Sfard, Kieran - Cognition As Communication - Rethinking Learning-By-Talking...

MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY, 8(1), 42–76
Copyright © 2001, Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition
Cognition as Communication: Rethinking

Learning-by-Talking Through Multi-Faceted Analysis
of Students’ Mathematical Interactions
Anna Sfard
Department of Education
The University of Haifa
Carolyn Kieran
Département de Mathématiques
Université du Québec à Montréal
… no one wants to abandon the train of his own discourse to answer questions that, coming from an-
other discourse, would necessitate rethinking the same thing with other words, perhaps ending up on
strange ground, far from the safe path. (Italo Calvino, 1983, p. 105)
In this article we take a close look at the now popular claim that many school subjects, and mathematics
among them, are best learned in an interactive way, through conversation with others. Two types of
specially devised analytical tools are used to analyze the data coming from a two-month-long series of
interactions between two 13-year-old boys learning algebra. Focal analysis gives us a detailed picture
of the students’ conversation on the level of its immediate mathematical contents and makes it possible
to assess the effectiveness of communication. This is complemented by preoccupational analysis,
which is directed at meta-messages and examines participants’ engagement in the conversation, thus
possibly highlighting at least some of the reasons for communication failure.
What we managed to see with the help of our special analytic tools led to a two-layered set of con-
clusions: It changed our opinion on learning-by-talking, and it also forced us to revise some of the basic
assumptions with which we began our study. First, while having a close look at the pair of students
working together, we realized that the merits of learning-by-talking cannot be taken for granted. Be-
cause of the ineffectiveness of the students’ communication, the collaboration we had a chance to ob-
serve seemed unhelpful and lacking the expected synergetic quality. Second, on the meta-level, we
concluded that what can be seen in classrooms does not make much sense as long as thinking is re-
garded as a self-sustained factor that regulates communication. For us, thinking became an act of com-
munication in itself. This reconceptualization led to the disappearance of several traditional dichoto-
mies that initially barred our insights: the dichotomy between “contents of mind” and the things people
say or do; the split between cognition and affect and the distinction between individual and social re-
search perspectives.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Anna Sfard, Department of Education, The University of Haifa, Haifa, Mount
Carmel 31905, Israel.
COGNITION AS COMMUNICATION 43
1. INTRODUCTION: QUESTIONS ABOUT LEARNING-BY-TALKING
In this article we begin with reflections on the now-popular idea that the best way to learn a subject
is to talk about this subject with others, and we end up revising some common beliefs on relations
between cognition and communication. Ours is a story of serendipitous findings. A research pro-
ject that was originally aimed at testing theoretically grounded hypotheses about learning algebra
unexpectedly spurred interest in the issue of learning-by-talking. Halfway through our investiga-
tions, we found ourselves totally engrossed in analyzing students’ interactions, with all the initial
questions pushed into the background.
Knowing the reasons for this remarkable metamorphosis of the project is important for under-
standing later claims and arguments. Our story begins in 1993, when we designed a 30-hr-long
teaching sequence with the help of which we hoped to stimulate and support students’ algebraic
thinking.1 The sequence was constructed as a series of activities, each of which was to be first per-
formed in pairs and then turned into a topic of teacher-coordinated classroom discussion. During
the subsequent 5 years the material was run experimentally in a private Montreal secondary
school, in all three of its Grade-7 classes. The majority of the 13-year-old students, although not
all of them, were from middle-class families, with parents in the professional and business ranks.
The mathematical background of the students was quite varied. During the first year, the teaching
was done by the two research assistants and by a teacher from the school. Both authors were there
as well, circulating in the class, helping the students and observing. All class and computer labora-
tory sessions were videotaped. While the students were working in pairs, two cameras were fo-
cused on two case-study pairs who were also interviewed by one of us from time to time.
According to the interviews and other traditional measures, the class was doing reasonably
well both throughout the course and at the final testing. And yet, a vague feeling of something be-
ing wrong prevented us from viewing the experiment as fully successful. The first incentive for
shifting our gaze to the issue of communication was a sense of uneasiness we had while listening
closely to students’ interactions. Intuitively, we knew that the majority of teams, and in particular
the two case-study pairs, had considerable difficulty communicating about mathematics.
To get a better sense of what we are talking about, let us consider one of these pairs. According
to what we could learn from interviews and examinations, the two boys, whom we shall call here
Ari and Gur, did reasonably well throughout the course. Their pretest scores, which were similar
enough and which corresponded to success on almost the same questions, were situated pretty
close to the class average: the average was 47.5%, almost like Ari’s 48% and slightly above Gur’s
43%. On the written test administered midway through the study, Ari scored 100% and Gur 78%;
and on the written test at the end of the teaching sequence, for which the class average was 71.1%,
Ari scored 94% and Gur 73%. To sum up, by the end of the experiment, both boys had performed
above the class average, while Ari was clearly more successful than his partner. As can be learned
from both the numerical assessments and verbal responses given in an attitudinal questionnaire in-
1
Our leading theoretical conjecture was that although both the history of algebra and our own studies on its learning
show the precedence of operational understanding over structural (Sfard, 1991; Kieran, 1992), “it is fairly possible that
massive use of computer graphics will reverse [this developmental order] so that the structural approach to algebra will be-
come accessible even to young children” (Sfard & Linchevski, 1994, p. 224; this is a rather specific version of a more gen-
eral claim that visual means can have beneficial effects on mathematical thinking; see Dreyfus, 1991; Schwartz &
Yerushalmy, 1992). The Montreal Algebra Project (MAP) was geared at testing this hypothesis. For more details about
MAP, see Kieran (1994) and Kieran and Sfard (1999).
44 SFARD AND KIERAN
cluded in the final test, the two boys were also reasonably pleased with the way they had learned
and they evaluated the course as both rich in content and innovative in approach. On the face of it,
we could conclude that our experiment was successful in attaining its goals, at least on this per-
sonal level. And yet, before going home with this encouraging assessment, let us take a close look
at the boys’ classroom interactions.
Figure 2 displays what we consider to be a representative sample of these joint activities. The
episode Daylight, taken from the students’ second meeting, lasted for a mere 2.5 min. This is how
long it took for Ari and Gur to answer the question “During which period of time did the number
of hours of daylight increase most rapidly?” using the graph presented in the Daylight activity
sheet (Figure 1). The reader is advised to pause now for a moment, take an unprejudiced look at
the transcript, and try to make sense of Ari and Gur’s exchange before continuing reading.
One does not need special analytical tools to realize that the brief episode can hardly be re-
garded as a case of successful collaboration. The boys do not even manage to arrive at an
agreed-upon answer, and this is quite telling. And yet, this single piece of evidence would not
merit much attention if not for its being quite representative of what was going on between the two
boys in general. Indeed, our conviction that something was basically wrong with Ari and Gur’s
interactions, when viewed from the perspective of their mathematical content, interactions deep-
ened throughout the systematic analysis of subsequent episodes. Whether watching the pair with
the naked eye or with the help of specially designed tools, we could not escape the impression that
not much mathematical learning occurred during the long hours the boys spent together, and that
the most effective progress was being made in those situations which were meant as occasions for
assessment rather than for learning: the interviews.
Gradually, the way Ari and Gur interacted shifted to become the center of our attention. As
we progressed in the data analysis, we became fully engrossed in questions which at the beginning
FIGURE 1 Daylight episode: Activity sheet.

FIGURE 2 Daylight episode: Protocol.
45
46 SFARD AND KIERAN
of our study would have been deemed of only secondary relevance: What is it that obviously hin-
ders Ari and Gur’s mutual understanding? What would turn their conversation into a success?
What is the role of the artifacts they are using in communication? And so, slowly but surely, the
issue of mathematical communication became the focus of our investigations, whereas all other
issues, including those that were the direct incentive for this study, were now formulated as its
derivatives.
Due to the change in research focus, yet another new question popped up—the question of
method. Indeed, to deal with the new set of problems we needed new types of analytical tools, tai-
lored to the particular shape and size of these problems. Initially, while still keeping in mind the
original aim of the project, we developed a special type of analysis that was expected to help us in
digging out, from the transcripts, the story of our students’ mathematical development.2 For rea-
sons that will be explained later, we called this type of analysis focal (object-level). And yet, as help-
ful as this tool proved to be in disclosing communicative successes and failures, it did not give us a
clue about their reasons. Eventually, we understood that the window we opened with the help of our
cognitively oriented type of analysis was too narrow, leaving too much out of sight. We decided to
complement our initial tool with another one, devised for the special purpose of diagnosing the way
students engage in interactions with others. We called the new method preoccupational (meta-level)
analysis.3 From now on, our painstakingly detailed investigation would be done by means of a com-
bined application of these two tightly interrelated ways of looking at data. We felt that by using the
two tools together we were able to escape the untenable dichotomies that, engraved in more tradi-
tional methods, had been barring the insights we were looking for. The tools themselves, and the
unified picture of cognitive and communicative processes that we eventually could draw with their
help, will be presented in the remainder of this article.
2. PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON THINKING AS COMMUNICATING
In this section we explain how the basic concepts communication and discourse should be under-
stood in this article. Although both these notions feature prominently in today’s literature, their
meaning varies considerably across texts and thus cannot be taken for granted.
Perhaps the most important point in the story of our research is that what we saw in the class-
room compelled us to bring the issue of communication to the center of our attention and reformu-
late all the original cognitive questions as its entailments. This reversal in the order of basic
conceptions became inevitable once we decided to make explicit our understanding of the relation
between cognition and communication. The way we saw this relation proved quite different from
what seems to transpire from popular claims on the role of conversation in learning. Thus, for ex-
ample, according to The Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (National
Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1989), talking mathematics helps the student “to clarify, re-
2
Our special-purpose analytic tools, although distinctive, have some features in common with certain methods that can
be found in the literature (see the semantic analysis of science class conversations aiming to “uncover the thematic patterns
of the science content” in Lemke, 1993, p. 231). Because of the uniqueness of the issues we wished to address—the way
mathematical content unfolds in a conversation—we felt compelled to depart from the existing methods.
3
These two types of analysis, focal and preoccupational, correspond roughly to what Brown and Yule (1983) call
transactional and interactional analysis, and what Halliday and Hasan (1976) call the analyses of ideational and interper-
sonal aspects of discourse, respectively.
fine, and consolidate their thinking” (p. 6) and thus promotes learning and improves the quality of
the resulting knowledge. This way of putting things implies that communication is auxiliary to
thinking and that mathematical knowledge and thoughts, are somehow primary to, or at least inde-
pendent of, the acts of communication. This is not how we view things in this article. Here, we no
longer regard thinking as a self-sustained, stand-alone individual function, prior to and independ-
ent of the activity of communication in its various manifestations (cf. the late work of
Wittgenstein, 1953, 1969). In fact, our basic epistemological belief goes farther than that: We pro-
pose that thinking, which is sometimes described as “talking to oneself,” may be usefully concep-
tualized as a variant of the activity of communicating.4 Of course, this “self-discourse” does not
have to be in any way audible or visible, and does not have to be conducted in words. Para-
phrasing Vygotsky’s ideas, we would say that whatever the means, thinking does not “express” it-
self through them but rather comes into being in their use. If so, thinking that takes place within
conversation with others becomes an activity of communication embedded into another commu-
nication activity, as presented in Figure 3. It is reasonable to assume that these simultaneous intra-
and interpersonal discourses inform and shape each other in a reflexive manner.
With respect to our study all this means that Ari and Gur’s communication will be investigated
as such and for what it is, and not as a mere didactic device or as a researcher’s “window” to their
minds (cf. Edwards, 1993, 1997). It also means that even if our main interest lies in students’ cog-
nitive activity, no other aspect of their interactions is deemed irrelevant. Students’ thinking is only
understood in the context of demands and patterns of the overall communicative activity of which
it is an inseparable part.
Communication itself is defined here, in the spirit of Grice (1975) and Levinson’s (1983) ap-
proach, as the use and production of means intended to make an interlocutor act or feel in a certain
way.5 The word discourse is used to denote any specific instance of communicating, whether
diachronic or synchronic, whether with others or with oneself, whether predominantly verbal or
with the help of any other symbolic system.
The definition we chose may be questioned for its being less commonsensical than the descrip-
tions that can be found in many places, and in dictionaries in particular. With the authors of Col-
lins Dictionary of the English Language (1986) we could say that communication is “the
imparting or exchange of information, ideas, or feelings,” and with Encyclopedia Britannica
(1998) we could claim that it is “the exchange of meanings between individuals through a com-
mon system of symbols.” These definitions certainly fit better with the folk models of communi-
cations implicit in everyday discourse. Alas, they also convey unhelpful entailments of this
model: They imply that information, ideas, feelings and meanings, which are inherently private,
can be objectified and become subject to external measurement and inter-personal comparisons.
According to these definitions, to find out whether communication works would require checking
whether the entity “sent” by a speaker—an idea, meaning or feeling—is “the same” as the one “re-
ceived” by the listener. Since the only way to judge the sameness of human experiences is to com-
4
Note that communicating may take place between a number of people, but it can also be an interaction between a person
and herself; after all, more often than not our thoughts take the form of an inner dialogue; compare Bakhtin’s (1986) idea of
dialogism or the conversation metaphor of mind, first proposed by Herbert Mead (1934); see also Holquist (1990); Ernest
(1993, 1994). For further elaboration see Sfard (2000a).
5
“Communication consists of the ’sender’ getting the ‘receiver’ to recognize that the ‘sender’ is trying to cause that
thought or action” (Levinson, 1983, p. 16). In the spirit of our dialogical vision of mind, the receiver may be the speaker.
48 SFARD AND KIERAN
FIGURE 3 Dialogue as a multilevel communication.
pare the discourses they produce, we would be estimating this sameness by assessing the
effectiveness of communication. And so, we would end up entangled into a logical circularity.
With our definition, the problematic comparisons are not necessary even though a reference is
made to intentions. Indeed, in the present case, the sender will gauge the success of communica-
tion by simply asking herself whether the respondent’s actions (and her own interpretation of
these actions) fit with her expectations. This obviates danger of circularity.
An explanatory remark would be in point. Our way of circumventing the danger of conceptual
circularity is not the only possible. Wittgenstein’s (1953) solution to the problem was to define
meaning in terms of external features of the discourse (see his famous Remark 43: “the meaning of a
word is its use in the language ,” p. 20), thus turning the meaning into a public affair and creating the
possibility of a non-circular definition of communication (provided the “use of a word in language”
is liable to a direct inspection). This may be an effective way of dealing with the logic of conceptual
system, but it does not seem adequate for our present purpose of understanding what and why people
actually do when they communicate. The experiential element, the reality of which for each one of
us cannot be denied, seems to play an important role in the interlocutors’ decision-making. Thus,
this element should not be ignored. Fortunately, as long as we are wary not to make any inter-per-
sonal experiential comparisons, including human experiences in the discourse on communication
seems logically safe. In spite of all this, we are well aware that careful Wittgenstein’s followers
(“discursive psychologists,”6 above all) may still be suspicious of our reliance on the notion of in-
tention. We hope that our special way of interpreting this notion protects us from falling into the pit-
falls against which they have been warning. In this paper intention is not meant to be in any way
prior to the utterance supposed to “convey” it, and it does not require any special “representation”.
Intention is an aspect of the act of communicating and it comes into being in this act. It finds its ex-
pression in all those properties of the utterance because of which the interlocutors are supposed to
6
See, for example, Edwards and Potter (1992), Harre and Gillett (1995), and Edwards (1997).
know what types of responses would count as appropriate. Being its aspect, intention does not
pre-exist the act of speaking anymore than the valence of an atom pre-exists the atom itself, and
thus does not require any separate, inherently private, means of communication, additional to
those used in interpersonal interactions. Just like valence allows an atom to combine only with
certain other atoms and makes it impossible to combine with some others, intention is the property
of utterance that allows it to be followed by some kinds of responses, but not by others. To bar un-
desirable entailments of the metaphor let us add immediately that unlike atoms, people can reflect
on what is happening to them, and this, of course, makes a big difference: Intentions may become
an object of explicit thought, and thus also of regulation, before, during, and after the action.7
Following our definition, we say that communication is effective if it fulfills its communicative
purpose, that is, the different utterances of the interlocutors evoke responses that are in tune with
the speakers’ meta-discursive expectations. This is in agreement with Levinson’s (1983) state-
ment that “communication is a complex kind of intention that is achieved or satisfied just by being
recognized” (p. 16; note that since intentions entail expectations, in certain contexts these two no-
tions can be used interchangeably). We emphasize the words “meta-discursive,” because to count
as an instance of effective communication the response has to be of an expected kind rather than
have a given content. There are two other aspects of the notion of effectiveness that must always
be remembered. First, we must always keep in mind that it is an interpretive concept: any assess-
ment of communication is based on personal interpretations of the discourse. The speaker com-
pares her intentions to the effects her statement had on an interlocutor; an observer—a passive
participant—compares the intentions evoked in him by the different interlocutors he is watching
and listening to. Different participants—and this includes the observer—may have differing opin-
ions on the effectiveness of the same conversation. Thus, when it comes to the evaluation of com-
municative efforts, it is important to be explicit about whose perspective is being considered.
Remembering all that, we may still agree to call a given instance of communication effective (just
like that, without specifying whose decision it is) if we appreciate that there is a reasonable chance
for a consensus between all the possible evaluators on its being fully successful. Second, our only
chance to succeed in this interpretive endeavor is to adhere to the principle similar to the one that
governs legal verdicts about a defendant’s innocence: an act of communication should be re-
garded as effective as long as there is no evidence to the contrary. In our analyses we will there-
fore be geared to detecting signals of communication breach rather than actively looking for a
direct confirmation of effectiveness.8
7
There is something quite misleading in the way we used to talked about intentions. Sometimes, when one makes an ut-
terance and then immediately adds “this is not what I wanted to say,” it does not mean, contrary to what is implied, that this
person had known in advance what she wanted to say (i.e., that she had an intention separate from what she actually said
later). If this was the case, she would just have said it. In fact, this person reflects on her intentions only after the utterance
was made. She becomes dissatisfied because this utterance does not seem to her to fit well with other things that had been
said or with her own present thoughts.
8
Constructing full-fledged interpretations of interlocutors’ intentions from scratch is a dauntingly intricate task, for
which we would not have sufficient grounds without certain restricting presumptions. Levinson (1983), inspired by Grice
(1975), pointed to one such principle, which he called “an assumption of topical coherence: … if a second utterance can be
interpreted as following on a first utterance, in a sense that they can be ’heard’ as being concerned with the same topic, then
such an interpretation of the second utterance is waranted, unless there are overt indications to the contrary” (p. 51). For fur-
ther elaboration see Sfard (2000a).
50 SFARD AND KIERAN
In the light of its restricted meaning, communicative effectiveness is but a precondition for the
success of a learning interaction. It is a feature without which there can be no talk of the educa-
tional productivity of such an interaction. The term productivity, in turn, refers to discourse which
can be proved to have had some concrete lasting effect: the discourse has led to the solution of a
problem, it influenced participants’ thinking and ways of communicating, it changed their mutual
positioning, it became richer in rules and concepts. In the case of mathematical discourse, an inter-
action will be regarded as educationally productive if it is likely to have a durable and desirable
impact on students’ future participation in this kind of discourse. Educational productivity is,
therefore, a normative concept, and it will always be judged against external educational goals
that have been set in advance.
We may now use the preceding vocabulary to articulate our hypothesis regarding Ari and
Gur’s interaction: We sensed that this interaction was not as productive as we expected it to be.
Because in situations like this the effectiveness of communication is the natural suspect, we de-
cided to concentrate on examining this aspect of the interactions. In the next section we do exactly
this: We scrutinize Ari and Gur’s interactions to see how effective they are.
3. DO THEY COMMUNICATE? FOCAL ANALYSIS OF ARI AND GUR’S

EARLY ENCOUNTER
We are now ready to take a closer look at Ari and Gur’s collaborative effort to learn algebra. In this
article, we deal with only two brief episodes, one of them taken from the boys’ second meeting, and
the other from their 21st session with us. Our reasons for sampling the 30-hr-long learning interac-
tion rather than trying to analyze it all along are similar to those that underlie medical doctors’ prac-
tice of putting patients through periodical checkups. We hope that in spite of their brevity, the scru-
tinized encounters will give us a reasonable notion about the ways the two boys learned and about
possible changes in their interaction patterns.
In this section we focus on the Daylight episode (see Figures 1 & 2). Before commencing our
disciplined detailed analysis of the event, let us note that the brief conversation can be divided into
three distinct phases, according to the intensity and the nature of the interaction. The episode be-
gins with the phase of pre-engagement, when both boys seem preoccupied with their own
thoughts rather than with the exchange with the partner; it continues with the period of engage-
ment when the students carry on a lively conversation about their respective solutions; and it ends
in disengagement, when the answers are written and the transition is made to the next problem on
the activity9 worksheet (see summary in Figure 4).
3.1 What Is Focal Analysis?
As we approach the detailed analysis of Ari and Gur’s exchange, our first task is to be more explicit
about the features of discourse that can count as indicators of its effectiveness or the lack thereof. Let us
begin with implementing the advice just given to the reader: Let us have an unprejudiced, direct look at
9
Here, and in some other places in this article, the word activity should be understood the way it is used in everyday
school parlance and not as it appears in Activity Theory.
FIGURE 4 The three-phase structure of the Daylight episode.
the protocol. According to the principle of “effectiveness by default” presented previously, we should
be looking for “negative” signs rather than “positive,” that is for cues of communication failure.
As it turns out, it does not take long to detect such cues. First signs of miscommunication ap-
pear as early as utterances [11] and [12], when the two boys propose differing answers to the
questions they were asked. This is what triggers discussion and begins the engagement phase.
The fact that the conversation immediately climbs to the meta-level and turns into a mixture of
object-level talk and “discourse about discourse” (see Ari’s “What are you talking about?” in
[14]) indicates that the interlocutors are aware of the problem themselves. It soon becomes
equally clear that they are not able to do much about it (see [38]), and the conversation ends
without an agreement.
We can conclude that Ari and Gur have a general communication problem, which shows on both
the object-level and the meta-level. Our next question is more ambitious. We would now like to know
more about the reasons for the difficulty. This compels us to dig deeper into the issue of communica-
tion effectiveness. As was argued in the previous section, effectiveness of an exchange means that all
the parties involved view their expectations as fulfilled by the interlocutors. The most fundamental
meta-discursive expectation of a speaker is that the conversation is coherent; that is, the respondent re-
fers in his or her response to the same thing the speaker had been talking about. Thus, effectiveness
may be presented as dependent upon the degree of clarity of the discursive focus: The communication
cannot be regarded as effective unless, at any given moment, all the participants seem to know what
objects they are talking about and feel confident that all the parties involved are referring to the same
things when using the same words. Let us look at Ari and Gur’s exchange to see whether it meets this
condition. Let us “zoom in” on the segment [17]–[21] where, following Ari’s exclamation “What are
you talking about?” ([14]), the boys try to compare their respective foci themselves.
Are Ari and Gur talking about the same object here? It does not seem to be the case: They have
diametrically opposed views about the features of their focus (“It changed most rapidly,” says Gur
in [17]; “It’s exactly the same,” responds Ari in [18]). If so, what is each one of them talking
about? Usually, this kind of question can be answered by identifying the name of the object that
the interlocutors are pronouncing (e.g., “Dina’s hat is nice”) or by pointing to the thing they are
looking at while talking (in the case of the hat, this would likely be a piece of clothing on Dina’s
head). Alas, not this time. Here, the boys are referring to the objects of their talk with the cryptic
“it” (see, e.g., [17]–[21]), and in spite of the clear controversy seem to be looking at the same parts
of the graph. If the things said and the images inspected were the only ingredients of the discursive
focus, the boys would have to arrive at full agreement. Instead, the controversy persists, and this
means that there is more to the objects they are talking about than meets the eye and the ear. In-
52 SFARD AND KIERAN
deed, the question the students were asked is not about the graph as such, but rather about numbers
of daylight hours, rates of increase, periods of most rapid change, and so on. The word “it” in the
successive utterances should be interpreted as referring, in one way or another, to the number of
daylight hours. Thus, except for what is pronounced (“it”) and what is attended to (the graph),
there is also a certain intended intangible entity the interlocutors seem to be referring to. Because
on the face of it the first two focal ingredients seem to be more or less the same for the two boys, it
must be the third one, the intended, that is the source of the controversy.
Let us try to figure out Ari’s and Gur’s intended foci, then. This is by no means an easy task, as
we are talking here about essentially private aspects of the boys’ activity, that is, aspects which
cannot be accessed “from outside” and cannot be compared. Nevertheless, once we agree on the
interpretive status of our claims (see the end of this section for a further elaboration), we may at-
tempt a conjecture about the intentions that made the boys behave the way they did. As to Ari, the
task is relatively straightforward: It seems that when saying “From day 60 to a hundred” (see [7],
[12]), he means exactly what he was asked to find out: the period of time during which the number
of daylight hours in Alert increases most rapidly.10 This particular period of time, therefore, is his
intended focus, one that he keeps in mind while inspecting the graph. Interpreting Gur’s intentions
turns out to be more difficult. In spite of Gur’s eloquence and his extensive gesticulation, it is not
easy to interpret his choice of the high plateau of the graph (the segment from x = 100 to x = 250)
as an attended focus. Let us leave these questions open for a few moments and give some thought
to the nature of the difficulty we are facing as interpreters.
The best way to fathom the special intricacy of the present case is to compare it to a simpler
one. Such an example may come from an everyday exchange, where interlocutors are discussing
familiar material objects which, perhaps, they can also inspect with their eyes as they are talking.
Indeed, let us imagine that Ari and Gur are talking about a hat rather than time:
Ari: Dina’s hat is nice.
Gur: I think it is rather ugly.
One may wonder whether in this case there is also a point in talking about intended focus as some-
thing in any way different from what is actually attended to. The answer is a definite yes: Even if a
conversation is about material objects, there is more to the focus than what can be seen or heard. It
is thanks to the intended focus that the interlocutors know what to say or to look at. Thus, when Ari
speaks of Dina’s hat, Gur knows how to interpret his partner’s intentions due to his own previous
experience with objects called hats. It is his intended focus, evoked by Ari’s pronounced focus,
thanks to which he knows that he should be looking up rather than down, and trying to locate an ob-
ject on Dina’s head. Gur’s intentions are also clear enough to make him distinguish without diffi-
culty between the hat and other objects that may be visible on Dina’s head (such as a ribbon, a
comb, or even Dina’s own hair). In short, whatever the discourse and whatever the nature of its ob-
jects, the intended focus is more than the picture one can see or imagine.
10
It does not matter that Ari’s answer is not precise; from all he says it is evident that he is searching the graph for its steepest
part. By the way, the boy does seem to be close to the precise solution in [34], where he mentions the number 90, one which
should be used as a lower limit of the “period of most rapid increase.” However, this number turns again into 60 in [38].
To sum up, discursive focus can be defined as a tripartite theoretical construct. The pronounced
focal element is public. The intended component, which may be described as a cluster of experi-
ences evoked by the other focal components plus all the statements a person would be able make on
the entity in question, is mainly private. Using a mathematical metaphor, one may say that the in-
tended focus is a gradient that directs the given pronounced focus toward its future discursive uses.
The attended focus, which includes not just the image a person perceives (or imagines), but also the
attending procedure she is performing while scanning this image, mediates between the two other
components. Because the attended focus can often be made explicit, translating private into public
and vice versa—the activity that is the essence of communication—becomes possible.
The examples we have already seen show that effectiveness of communication depends pri-
marily on the intended focus. Intended focus, however, being predominantly private, is an un-
likely subject for comparison. The resolution of this dilemma may be found, once again, in the
idea of interpretation. Interpreting is a natural activity, performed by all humans in an instinctive
manner upon hearing spoken words. The speakers’ utterances and pointing movements bring to
the listener’s mind her own intended foci fitting these particular utterances and gestures. This
means that one’s assessment of communicative coherence, carried out while participating in a
conversation or just listening to one, does not entail comparing the intended foci of different inter-
locutors. Even if we say “Person A has a different intended focus than Person B” (as we are likely
to do, unable to escape the dictum of the folk model of communication) we are, in fact, comparing
our own intended foci evoked by A’s and B’s. Thus, whatever our verdict with respect to the co-
herence and effectiveness of a given instance of communication, it should always be regarded as
not more than the best hypothesis we were able to produce so far.
3.2 Focal Analysis of the Daylight Episode
Endowed with the concept of discursive focus we may now return to the analysis of Ari and Gur’s
conversation. While looking at the graph, the boys are supposed to talk about numbers of daylight
hours, rates of increase, periods of most rapid change, and so forth, all of which belong to the distant
northern town, Alert. None of these can be accessed directly. True, this would also be the case in the
latest example if Dina’s hat were not within the interlocutors’ sight. The present situation is still quite
different in that making any direct comparisons of the amount of daylight between the different days
of a year is generally impossible, whether a person lives far from Alert or in the town itself. Such
comparisons can only be done thanks to mediating artifacts. The principal role of symbolic devices,
such as the graph in Figure 1, is to overcome the extension in time, making the transitory constantly
present and, at the same time, providing tangible means of communication about the phenomenon at
hand. In our present episode, the graph squeezes long hours of daylight on any given day into a single
point, and makes it possible to view the numbers measured on different days as coexisting in one line.
In this curve, the reified spells of daylight are caught simultaneously into a timeless whole, the differ-
ent components of which may occupy different places in space, but not in time.11
11
Although we say that the graph is a representation of these objects (the length of daylight periods, the increase in the
length of these periods, etc.), the objects themselves would not exist without it (or any other symbol, belonging to an iso-
morphic symbolic system). Please note that in the present context, the word exist refers to the fact that we are able to think
and talk about the object, and perhaps even to regard it as something that is, in a sense, external to and independent of our
thinking or talking about it.
54 SFARD AND KIERAN
In short, symbolic means are our only gateway to the focus of the present conversation, the “period of
most rapid increase” (and this is quite different from the case of a hat, which can also be touched,
smelled, played with, etc.). Moreover, unlike the case of Dina’s hat, the graph gives itself to many differ-
ent interpretations and allows for numerous, multi-layered, intended foci. Thus, for example, a point on a
graph may be seen simply as such—as the little mark paper, or as representing a pair of numbers, x and y.
The numbers, in their turn, can be viewed as abstract mathematical objects or as representing, respec-
tively, a day of a year and the length of the daylight spell on that day. Moreover, we could easily reinter-
pret the graph so that the numbers represent something completely different, say one’s bank savings (it
would be much more difficult to re-interpret the picture of the hat in this way; that it is not altogether im-
possible has been shown by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1945/1992, in The Little Prince! ). One can think
of activities with the graph as consisting of intermittent suspending and activating of its different signify-
ing functions. The back-and-forth movements along the “chain of signification”12 are usually quick and
natural, and we are rarely aware of them. On the other hand, these layers of signification are an infallible
source of communication difficulties (think, for example, of the numerous intended foci that may hide
behind Ari’s “it” in utterance [20]: “It goes up most rapidly”).
Let us resume our attempt to figure out Gur’s intended focus. Whereas Ari appears to have no
difficulty zig-zagging along the chain of conceptual entities connecting the natural phenomenon
with the graph, Gur clearly fails to reach deeper layers of signification. Gur’s intended focus seems
to remain all the time at the most superficial level. The boy evidently takes the words appearing in
the text of the problem (“increase,” “rapidly”) as referring to the properties of the graph itself.
Vygotsky (1978) would say that Gur is still “a captive of his field of vision.” As a result, whereas Ari
aims, as might be expected, at the number of daylight hours and the most rapid increase in this num-
ber, Gur, having no other intended focus than the graph itself, has no choice but try to apply the
terms “increase” and “change”13 to this graph—to interpret them as properties of the graph. More-
over, because the graph is a stable object, Gur has difficulty with the word “rapid,” which only
makes sense in the context of a process. One way to explain his choice of the upper plateau of the
graph is that, confined to the context of the line that does not stand for anything else, he interprets the
words “most rapid change” as, simply, referring to the most extreme change in the graph’s shape.
Figure 5 makes it possible to follow up the flow of focus along the different channels. The dis-
play brings the difference between the boys’ intended foci into full relief. In addition, it makes it
clear that, although the students seem to be looking at the same parts of the graph all along, their
attended foci are probably not the same (the attended part does not remain the same from one ut-
terance to another, but thanks to Gur’s suggestive pointing, Ari is able to follow his “shifts” and
“zooms”). It seems that each one of them looks at the graph in his own way. Whereas Gur con-
ceives of the graph or its parts as nondecomposable gestalts, Ari focuses his attention on selected
aspects, such as the height of the given part of the line.14
12
The concept of “chain of signification,” extensively dealt with (under differing names) by the prominent semioticians
Peirce and Lacan, has been explained and instantiated in Walkerdine (1988) and in Cobb, Gravemeijer, Yackel, McClain,
and Whitenack (1997).
13
It is significant that at some point ([17]) Gur substitutes “change” for the original term “increase” (“change” does not
appear in the text of the problem). It seems that the word “change” is more easily interpretable as referring to the graph. In-
deed, it is not self-evident what “increase” may mean with respect to a horizontally placed drawing!
14
This distinction between the two ways of looking at the graph is reminiscent of the difference between “visual” and
“analytic” thinking (Kieran, Hillel, & Erlwanger, 1986) and of their levels in van Hiele’s model (Van Hiele, 1985; Clements
& Battista, 1992).
FIGURE 5 Ari’s and Gur’s tripartite foci.
From all that has been said so far it is obvious that the conversation between Ari and Gur can be
described as incoherent: interlocutors’ discursive foci do not fit each other, at least along the in-
tended-focus axis, and thus also along the attended-focus axis. In effect, the boys are arguing sim-
ply because, although looking in the same direction, they are not seeing the same thing. Clearly,
incoherence is one of those features that make communication ineffective, especially if it is unrec-
ognized by the interlocutors. Thus, on the face of it, one should always remain somewhat suspi-
cious about one’s own interpretation of other interlocutors’ intended foci and alert to the
possibility that this interpretation may, in fact, be incompatible with the other persons’ interpreta-
tions. As noted by many writers, however, assuming coherence when talking is a condition of
communicating (Grice, 1975; Levinson, 1983). Indeed, quite often we would be unable to make
sense of our partners’ responses if we did not believe that they referred to the same thing. That is
why people are usually reluctant to admit a disparity of foci, even in cases of the most resilient
controversy.15
No wonder, then, that Gur and Ari spend quite a while simply contradicting each other before
Ari eventually makes an attempt to be more explicit about his intended focus. Evidently suspect-
ing that Gur does not interpret the graph in a proper way, Ari brings up emphatically the underly-
ing motif of time (see [28] and [30]).16 This attempt, however, turns out unsuccessful. The failure,
it seems, is due to at least two tactical mistakes. First, both Gur and Ari make extensive use of the
deictic “it” and never try to call the object of their attention by its proper name. Second, neither of
15
Levinson (1983) explained why we must keep this assumption in mind if we wish to make the best of the communica-
tion. For example, when we ask somebody “Can you meet me today” and this other person responds “I am sick”, we would
not be able to understand the response without assuming that our partner, like ourselves, refers to the issue of a possible
meeting in spite of the fact that nothing in his reply indicates this fact explicitly. The assumption of relevance (see Grice’s
maxim of relevance, 1975, p.107) is necessary if we want to fill in gaps between adjacent utterances in a conversation.
16
In [28] Ari uses the pronounced focus ’time’ while his intended focus is evidently the number of hours of daylight per
day. This seems the only workable interpretation, as he speaks about the necessity to consider the “rapid changes” of this
“time”. In his next utterance, [30], while using the same word “time” he changes the intended focus (back?): in this case, the
intended focus is what it should be: time in year (period) during which the number of daylight hours changes most rapidly.
His momentary confusion is probably the result of the fact that the word time has a double meaning here and may be mea-
sured in days along the x-axis, and in hours along the y-axis.
56 SFARD AND KIERAN
them is really explicit about his attended focus. What has not been achieved with the pronounced
focus could have been attained with the help of the latter.
4. WHY DON’T THEY COMMUNICATE? PREOCCUPATIONAL

ANALYSIS OF ARI AND GUR’S EARLY ENCOUNTER
4.1 A Few Words on the Concept of Preoccupation
Through the systematic focal analysis of Ari and Gur’s exchange we have seen that this ex-
change was doubly unsuccessful: The boys failed to communicate, and they failed in their at-
tempt to remedy this situation. In this section we try to fathom possible sources of this twofold
difficulty.
There are a great many possible reasons why people may fail behaving according to their inter-
locutors’ intentions and, in particular, why they may interpret other people’s discursive foci in un-
helpful ways. If the communication is to have any chance of success at all, certain unwritten rules
of interaction must be observed. Indeed, the ways people communicate with others, even if not re-
ally predictable, are nevertheless far from arbitrary. Sequences of interactants’ moves are subject
to a wide array of requirements, many of which are independent of the actual contents of an ex-
change. Many writers have spoken extensively about different kinds of meta-discursive rules that
make communication possible and ensure its effectiveness.17 Thus, for example, Gadamer (1975)
coined the term true conversation and defined it as one in which “each opens himself to the other
person, truly accepts his point of view as worthy of consideration” (p. 347). Such an attitude cer-
tainly increases the chances of a shared discursive focus. In an attempt to be more specific, Grice
(1975) formulated a Cooperative Principle and a number of general conversational maxims (of
quantity, quality, relation, and manner) which people seem to obey instinctively in order to com-
municate.18 A rather different, although not unrelated, outlook is offered by Goffman (1967), who
devoted special attention to the case of misinteraction. This last term refers to interactions in
which participants do not live up to their discursive obligations and fail to follow the “interaction
ritual.” Interlocutors’ preoccupation with matters other than the object-level topic of conversation
is brought to the fore by Goffman as the principal reason for such failure. Although violations of
the “ritual” do not have to disable the discourse, they are still quite likely to decrease the chance of
coordinated foci and thus significantly undermine the communicative effectiveness of the conver-
sation. Whereas Goffman’s concern is with offence resulting from the violation of rules, we deal
in this article with the next element in the chain of effects—the impact of misinteraction on the
cognitive aspects of the story. Because of its central importance for the issue of communicative
effectiveness, the concept of preoccupation deserves some elaboration.
Let us recall that communication was defined as an attempt to make other people act or feel ac-
cording to one’s intentions. It is important to stress now that there are two types of goals that may
17
These conversational rules are a double-edged sword: They are what makes communication possible, in the first place,
but they also limit these interactions in a considerable way. See Wittgenstein (1953) on rules-following, and also Griffin and
Mehan (1981), Goffman (1967, 1981, 1986), Cazden (1988), Garfinkel (1967), Quine (1960), Voigt (1985, 1994, 1995),
Cobb, Wood, and Yackel (1993).
18
On the criticism of this theory and the arguments against this criticism see Levinson (1983) and Blum-Kulka (1997).
generate local discursive intentions. First, there is overt goal of a given activity that produces overt
object-level (cognitive) intentions. In the case of school mathematical discourse, a student may
have an immediate object-level goal of solving a mathematical problem that, in turn, is embedded
into the long-term goal of learning some new mathematics. Some aspects of the related intentions
have already been taken care of with the help of focal analysis. The other type of goals, which are
usually less visible even if not less influential, is related to various aspects of the interaction itself.
This latter category, which may be called meta-discursive or meta-level, is wide and multifarious,
and it includes, on the one hand, interlocutors’ concerns about the way the interaction is being
managed and, on the other hand, the weighty, and sometimes quite charged, issues of the relation-
ship between interlocutors. After all, every instance of communication is an occasion for renegoti-
ating interlocutors’ mutual positioning and their respective identities (this applies to a
conversation between a number of people much more than to one person’s “inner discourse,” that
is to the thinking process). Different means are usually used by participants for communicating
the object-level and meta-level goals. Whereas the former are best expressed in explicit ways, the
latter are likely to reside in forms of utterances and in mechanisms of interaction rather than in
their explicit contents. Because of the predominantly covert nature of interpersonal messages, the
meta-level discursive intentions often remain invisible even to those whom they affect. In our
analysis, we must remain wary of making the mistake of taking the contents and the foci of com-
munication at their face value.
The two categories of discursive intentions, object- and meta-level, seem unrelated and, on the
face of it, the latter could be left aside when the cognitive side of learning interaction is being in-
vestigated. In fact, there is a constant tension between the two types of intentions, if only because
of the simple fact that they compete for being the focus. Interpersonal communication is a particu-
larly complex phenomenon in that at any given moment each participant is simultaneously in-
volved in a number of object-level and meta-level tasks: in trying to understand the explicit
contents of previous utterances and to produce new ones, in monitoring the interaction, in present-
ing herself to others the way she would like to be seen, in engineering her position within the given
group, and so on. Because all these different concerns must be attended to at the same time, it
seems a miracle that people are ever up to the task of communicating at all.
And thus, as discourse evolves, its focus—and participants’ attention—is moving between
channels—between a person’s own line of thought and those of his or her partners; and it also
winds back and forth between discursive levels—between the explicit object of discourse and
meta-discursive considerations. If the conversation is to be effective, the focal navigation must be
done smoothly and effortlessly, with the interlocutors’ intellectual resources saved for the major,
object-level, task. In the rest of this section we try to find out whether Ari and Gur’s exchange ful-
filled all these conditions.
4.2 What Is Preoccupational Analysis?
Focal analysis, that dissects interlocutors’ object-level discursive actions, will now be complete
with preoccupation analysis deals with the question of how the participants of a conversation move
between different channels of communication (private, interpersonal) and different levels (ob-
ject-level and meta-level). In this section, we begin with the question of how Ari and Gur regulated
the degree of individual and interpersonal activity. We then use the findings to make conjectures
58 SFARD AND KIERAN
about the meta-level contents of the conversation, that is about those intentions of the two interloc-
utors that have to do with the discourse itself and with interpersonal matters rather than with the ex-
plicit theme of the exchange. For example, it is reasonable to expect that in the pre-engagement
phase the students would signal to each other their wish to work alone for a while, whereas dis-
course in the engagement phase would convey an opposite meta-level message. Our principal tool
in this kind of analysis is the interactivity flowchart. With the help of this special instrument, we are
able to evaluate the interlocutors’ interest in activating different channels and in creating a real dia-
logue with their partners. This information in turn, we hope, allows us to make conjectures about
the matters that preoccupied the interlocutors.
Interactivity analysis. Because people’s utterances, whether audible and public or silent
and private, are produced for the sake of communication, they are never stand-alone, isolated
events. Communication is a process in which any particular action always means addressing
somebody or reacting to somebody’s former utterances, or both. This is true even when all we can
hear or read is a single sentence.19 In this article we speak about reactive and proactive (re-
sponse-inviting) utterances, thus distinguishing between the two types of speaker’s meta-discur-
sive intentions: the wish to react to a previous contribution of a partner or the wish to evoke a re-
sponse in another interlocutor. We can therefore look upon consecutive utterances in a discourse as
endowed with invisible arrows that relate them to other utterances—those which have already been
pronounced and those which are yet to come. These arrows are our metaphor for a speaker’s
meta-level intentions, communicated indirectly. By addressing her partners, the speaker lets them
understand that she is interested in an interaction.
The organization of these invisible arrows in a conversation often reveals certain regulari-
ties. The recurring forms of reactive and proactive behaviors, in their turn, may help in deciding
whether interlocutors are really addressing their partners or, in fact, concentrating on a “conver-
sation with themselves.” In this article, interaction analysis is performed with the help of a dia-
gram in which the imaginary arrows mentioned previously are made visible. Let us now say a
few words about the construction of such interaction flowcharts. While going through the expla-
nations, the reader is advised to look at the example in Figure 6 and a summary of the method in
Figure 7.
In the flowchart, the two personal channels, namely the respective “parts” of the two boys, are
shown in columns A and B. Their combined channels are presented in column C. The numbers
marking the little circles correspond to the numbers of the utterances in the episode transcript
(sometimes, we split a turn into several utterances, numbered with letters a, b, c …). As can be
seen in Figure 6, there are two types of arrows that originate in the different utterances:
1. Reactive arrow—an arrow that points vertically or diagonally backward or upward: this type
of arrow expresses the fact that the source utterance (the one in which the arrow originates) is a re-
action to the target utterance (the one to which it is pointing);
19
Compare Bakhtin’s (1986) statements on addressivity and responsivity of utterances, and his claim that “there can be
no such thing as an isolated utterance” (p. xix).
FIGURE 6 Interaction flowchart: Daylight episode.
59
60 SFARD AND KIERAN
FIGURE 7 Interaction flowchart symbols.
2. Proactive arrow—an arrow pointing vertically or diagonally forward or downward: this

type of arrow symbolizes the fact that the source utterance invites a response, so that the following
utterance is expected to be a reaction. Note that the proactive arrow will be drawn even if, in fact,
the target utterance turns out not to relate to the source utterance and thus cannot count as a reac-
tion. In other words, what should be considered in deciding about the nature of utterance are the in-
tentions of the speaker, and not of his partner.
Both types of arrows may go between two private channels; in other words, they may connect
utterances made by different interlocutors. These are the slanted arrows. However, both proactive
and reactive arrows can also go vertically, linking utterances placed within the same private chan-
nel. In this latter case, the arrow reflects the fact that an interlocutor is conducting a conversation
with himself, namely reacts to his own statements and invites his own responses. The solid arrows
symbolize object-level utterances, whereas meta-level interactions are marked with dotted lines
(we are talking about meta-level discourse when the focus of an utterance is on discursive ele-
ments rather than on the objects of mathematics). Often, two kinds of statements are “nested” one
within the other, but the interaction itself is usually of a “pure” kind, namely invites, or reacts to,
only one of the two components.
Let us make two general remarks on the interaction analysis before we actually apply the
method to the Daylight episode. According to the preceding description, interaction analysis is
concerned with the question of how, and whether, the interlocutors join forces in molding and
controlling the discourse, and how keen they are to ensure the effectiveness of their communica-
tion. On the face of it, therefore, this type of analysis is content-independent; that is, it is deter-
mined by the relationships between discourse participants rather than by the nature of the task at
hand. In fact, however, in order to decide about the proactive or reactive nature of an utterance,
one has to consider its contents, as well as the contents of other utterances in the chain. Although it
is true that while analyzing interaction we are interested in meta-discursive intentions of the inter-
locutors, it is also true that these intentions can only be identified by looking at the content (the
lack of direct reference to the content in this kind of analysis does not mean that the resulting pic-
ture is not content-specific also on a more general level: We conjecture the possibility of quite dif-
ferent patterns of interaction if the boys were dealing with another topic). Similarly, focal analysis
is, to some extent, dependent on the results of preoccupational analysis. Thus, although we report
on the results of the two types of analysis in a serial order, neither of them is self-contained and
none can be carried out independently of the other. These two ways of looking at discourse are in-
extricably interconnected and a trustworthy picture of the process of learning can only be obtained
by putting the results of one of them in the context of those produced by the other.
Second, drawing an interaction flowchart is, naturally, an interpretive task, and so it is quite
likely that charts obtained by different analysts would sometimes differ in a number of details.
From our experience, however, the users of the method usually attain a high degree of consensus.
In preparing the flowcharts presented in Figure 6, whenever we hesitated as to the exact
interactional status of an arrow (e.g., we could not decide whether it is targeted at the interlocutor
or at the speaker himself), we drew a dashed arrow.
4.3 Preoccupational Analysis of Daylight Episode
Interactivity analysis of Daylight episode. From the flowcharts we got for the Daylight
episode (Figure 6) it is quite clear that the interactive behaviors of the two boys differed in a signifi-
cant way. The difference becomes particularly salient when one looks at the two “one-sided” dia-
grams in Figure 6, columns A and B.
Let us begin by analyzing Ari’s meta-level communicative actions. Because of the unbalanced
form of column A in Figure 6, the overall impression is that Ari is trying to avoid, or at least mini-
mize, a true bidirectional interaction with Gur. Here are some salient characteristics of his discur-
sive actions that point in this direction.
Ari’s flowchart begins with an integrated stretch of utterances running along his private chan-
nel. This long strip of continuous self-talk, corresponding to the pre-engagement phase, shows
Ari’s preference for working separately, at least for as long as he needs to arrive at the solution of
the problem. This phenomenon can be observed twice during the brief episode—see segments
[1]–[12] and [44]–[49]. A number of other features of the flowchart in Figure 6, column A point in
the same direction. Perhaps the most striking of them is its unidirectionality: Although there are
some reactive arrows, proactive arrows are almost nonexistent (except in [14], [16], and [38]; note
that all these are cases of meta-discursive utterances in which Ari tries to regulate the interaction
rather than evoke a genuine object-level conversation). Even when in the engagement phase, and
evidently trying to correct Gur’s solution, Ari limits his utterances to reactions to what Gur says.
Sometimes, he simply presents his alternative view. One can say, therefore, that the boy refrains
from response-inviting utterances, evidently not being interested in a prolonged interaction with
his partner. We sum up by saying that his discursive conduct is uninitiating. Moreover, in spite of
the prevalence of reactive utterances, Ari’s behavior may also be described as unresponsive. In-
deed, he rarely offers direct fully fledged answers to Gur’s proactive statements. More often than
not, Ari turns to Gur only to express his disagreement. It is also quite remarkable that Ari is rather
quick, indeed abrupt, in initiating the disengagement phase. Thus, in [40], after only a very brief
(and not necessarily very sincere!) attempt to bring the evidently incoherent conversation back
into focus, he gives up and turns his attention to a new question. He is also quite adamant in his de-
cision to leave the limping conversation rather than try to make it run again. First, he cuts the dis-
cussion short by saying that he will write his answer ([40]), then he sanctions this step by objecting
62 SFARD AND KIERAN
to the norm that requires everybody to have the same answer ([42]), and finally proceeds to the
next question ([44]) and persists in solving it in spite of Gur’s attempts to stop him ([47], [49]).
Let us turn to Gur now (see Figure 6, column B). One glimpse at the arrows originating in Gur’s
utterances is enough to notice that the boy’s interactional behavior is, in a sense, the exact oppo-
site of that of his partner. Indeed, the new flowchart seems rather disintegrated in comparison with
the other one, even in the pre-engagement phase. Further, Ari’s unidirectional activity stands in
striking contrast to the highly interactive, bidirectional behavior of Gur, who “bombards” his part-
ner with proactive statements, and thus displays an initiating attitude. The ratio between the num-
bers of Ari’s and Gur’s proactive utterances is 3:11! Being determined both to talk and to listen,
Gur has a full arsenal of means for sustaining contact and spurring response. Except for extensive
gesturing and numerous proactive statements, Gur himself is highly responsive. Particularly inter-
esting are his means for signaling attention to his partner’s utterances (“Whoa” in [2]), and for
drawing attention (“look,” etc.). Some of these seem to have no other role than to say “I hear you”
and to initiate or sustain an engagement phase.
The different proportions of initiating and reacting activations disclose different needs, attitudes,
and expectations of the two interlocutors. For those interested in the two boys’ perception of their mu-
tual positioning, the interactive structure of the discourse is particularly revealing. Gur’s eloquence,
gesturing, and generally highly interactive behavior may create an impression that he is the one who
navigates the conversation. A closer look reveals a rather different picture. Ari uses interaction curb-
ing and camouflaging techniques to ensure his way in discourse. These techniques are particularly
well instantiated in the disengagement phase, [38]–[49]. Ari is the one to initiate this discursive turn
and he seems truly determined to have his will. He cuts short any further discussion on the problem
which, after being solved, does not interest him any longer. He decides to “write his answer” and turns
to the next question. Ari’s disengagement technique is rather impolite, although he tries to
camouflage20 his impatience in many ways (e.g., he speaks in a pleasant tone and justifies his move
with the “norm”: “We can have different answers” [42]). Being interested much more than Ari in a
true communication, Gur finds himself in a somewhat inferior position. Ari’s disengagement action,
showing his self-assurance and somewhat condescending attitude, makes his partner acutely aware of
this uneven positioning. Gur copes with the situation with the help of multifarious face-saving tech-
niques.21 Thus, after he reacts spontaneously to Ari’s declaration with a request for explanation ([43]:
“Why?”), he immediately comes to his senses and puts on an indifferent face by saying “I don’t care”
([43]). Then, when Ari defiantly makes a move to the next question on the worksheet ([44]), Gur pre-
tends to be still engrossed in the former one ([45]), and still convinced of his being right (while in fact
he probably doubts it). Eventually, when in [44]–[48] Ari stubbornly sticks to his private channel, pre-
tending Gur is not there, Gur eventually gives up by offering Ari “friendly” advice (“I am telling you,
change it”) and concluding with “Anyway, it doesn’t matter”([49]).
We may sum up by saying that although Gur is evidently very much concerned with his positioning
in the discourse and thus interested in a genuine bidirectional interaction, Ari would rather be left alone.
To put it differently, Ari is mainly preoccupied with object-level issues (solving the mathematical prob-
lem) whereas Gur focuses his attention on the interaction itself. The two boys’ respective preoccupations
are bound to have a considerable impact on how they manage their private channels and how well they
20
Goffman (1967) would say that with the help of these camouflaging techniques Ari tries to minimize the offence stem-
ming from his inability (or should we say unwillingness) to meet the standards of polite, satisfying, interaction.
21
See Goffman (1967).
function on the object-level. This influence is discussed in the next section, where we combine the results
of our two analyses in order to get a deeper insight into the cognitive side of the story.
4.4 Putting the Results of Focal and Preoccupational Analyses Together:

There Is a Need for Change
The focal analysis shows that there was very little coherence in Ari and Gur’s conversation. It is
truly remarkable how ineffective this attempt at communication was in spite of the many means,
visual and verbal, employed all along the way, and in spite of the fact that Ari was rather successful
in his private efforts to solve the problem. Using traditional cognitivist language, we could sum up
these results by saying that Gur, unlike Ari, displayed little mathematical understanding. We could
then go on and make conjectures about the two boys’ mathematical abilities. However, the preoc-
cupation analysis suggests we should probably consider a more local, situation-specific interpreta-
tion of the case at hand before venturing any far-reaching inferences about the students’ general
potential for dealing successfully with mathematics. Rather than (or, at least, in addition to)
speaking of Ari and Gur’s mathematical abilities, thus making indirect hypothetical assertions re-
garding their past and future mathematical performance, we may look for possible reasons for the
boys’ unsatisfactory results in their discursive functioning. Indeed, in the present case, the quality
of interaction is a more immediate suspect than the quality of the students’ individual minds. As the
preoccupation analysis has shown, at least one of the students might have had problems with man-
aging his focus between objet-level and meta-level matters. In such a situation, one does not need
to have recourse to the person’s general mathematical abilities to account for his failure to solve a
mathematical problem. To have a deeper insight into the ways in which the interaction might have
interfered with the cognitive activity of the boys, let us revisit their private channels—the principal
setting of this kind of activity.
Gur’s private channel, as presenting itself in the interactivity flowchart 6B, seems fragmentary,
discontinuous, and almost deserted. Gur is fully engrossed in trying to ensure exchange with Ari
and does not look like a person who really tries to talk or listen to himself. Metaphorically speak-
ing, such a preoccupation with interpersonal matters and the activity along the interpersonal chan-
nel is bound to weaken the flow of one’s inner discourse. In contrast, Ari, who saves most of his
attention for his private channel, seems to have no problem with keeping his object-level focus
well-formed and consistent. He proves also quite skillful in monitoring his own object-level activ-
ity. Nevertheless, there are signs that the interpersonal communication does take its toll in his case
as well. This expresses itself in one phenomenon that recurs quite a number of times in the course
of the brief exchange: there are momentary deviations of focus, usually corrected spontaneously,
without Ari’s ever becoming aware of the brief “zig-zag.” This is what happens, for example, with
the already noted inaccuracy in his use of the word “time” in the sub-episode [28]–[36] (see Foot-
note 16) or with his momentary change of mind with regard to the period of most rapid increase in
the number of hours of daylight ([32], [34]; see also Footnote 10).
To sum up, interpersonal interaction does seem to interfere with Ari’s thinking even if the results of
this inference are not as visible and consequential as in Gur’s case. It is because of Ari’s insistence on
following his own track of mind that his attended, and thus intended, foci are stable and resilient to mo-
mentary fluctuations of pronounced foci. It is probably for the same reason that he is clearly oblivious
to the “slips of tongue” on the part of his partner. For example, he remains unaware of Gur’s substitu-
64 SFARD AND KIERAN
tion of “change” instead of “increase” (see [17] and on), and he even adopts Gur’s language for a while
([28]) —an act that, obviously, has no effect on the continuity of attended and intended foci along his
private channel (his intended focus still fits the pronounced focus “increase” rather than “change”).
The preceding analysis shows that interactive problem solving may be seen as an intricate
trade-off between the needs of interpersonal communication and those of individual thinking,
both of which are supposed to take place at the same time. Interlocutors’ intellectual resources
may be ample, but they certainly have their limits. Attention to the interpersonal channel of com-
munication would usually come at the expense of a person’s attention to his private channel. In the
most extreme situation, when the needs of the interpersonal channel overshadow any other, one’s
cognitive activity related to the mathematical content of the conversation may be discontinued. In
such a case, there is no point in trying to say anything about this person’s “mathematical think-
ing,” which is simply in suspension.
As a result, and contrary to expectations, the conversation with the relatively knowledgeable
and successful partner did not spur Gur’s progress, and the incoherent discourse clearly did not
contribute to his understanding. Was it because the interlocutors were not truly open to the other’s
thinking, or because they did not have the skills necessary for effective interaction? Probably a lit-
tle of both. When facing the results of our analysis for the first time, we consoled ourselves with
the thought that the problems we identified were local and transitory. The students would grow
into an effective communication with each other naturally and effortlessly, we told ourselves.
Thus, when beginning the analysis of a much later episode, we expected to see the discourse more
coherent and effective and the unhelpful tension absent and forgotten.
5. WILL THEY LEARN TO COMMUNICATE?

ANALYSIS OF ARI & GUR’S LATE ENCOUNTER
5.1 Focal and Preoccupational Analysis of Slope Episode
In this section we meet Ari and Gur again, six weeks and 20 lessons later. The activity sheet and the
transcript of the new 2-min-long exchange between the boys presented in Figures 8 and 9 are taken
FIGURE 8 Slope episode: Activity sheet.

FIGURE 9 Slope episode: Protocol.
65
66 SFARD AND KIERAN
from the 21st session. Before reading on to see what we have to say on the subject, the reader is ad-
vised to try to give an estimation of changes that might have occurred in the patterns of Ari and
Gur’s discursive activities since the Daylight episode.
One does not need to go into the detailed analysis to see that the hope for change did not materi-
alize. However one looks at the present conversation, the similarity to the Daylight episode is
striking. This similarity expresses itself first of all in the overall structure of the event. In the pres-
ent case, the students are presented with a table of a linear function g and are supposed to find cer-
tain values of this function that are not explicitly shown. The two-minute long conversation can be
divided into two separate sub-episodes, each of which deals with a different value of the function:
the sequence [1]–[28] is a conversation about g(6), whereas the segment [28]–[40] is devoted to
g(10). In spite of a rather substantial difference in the length of the two sub-episodes, their tripar-
tite arrangement is exactly the same as in the Daylight episode (see Figure 10; cf. Figure 4).
In the three-phase overall structure of each interaction, it is the relatively restrained Ari rather
than the outgoing Gur who sets the pace. Every new activity starts with the pre-engagement period
during which the problem at hand is tackled by the boys separately. Ari will not leave this phase
until he has the problem solved. In fact, the boys never really solve problems together. The en-
gagement phase begins only when there is a ready solution or two to discuss. In all three cases, the
only reason for the engagement is a certain controversy between Ari and Gur: either the boys have
different solutions, or only Ari has one. Ari invariably pushes his own solution, refuses to really
listen to Gur, and remains unaware of the sources of his partner’s mistakes. Gur, in turn, is too
keen to save face to persist in questioning his partner. Even if he does interrogate, he does it rather
ineffectively. The disengagement, usually initiated by Ari,22 always comes quicker than Gur
would like it to happen, but the boy is too proud to insist on a postponement. Thus, as a rule, the in-
teraction is disrupted before Gur has a chance to learn from it anything substantial.
The quality of Ari and Gur’s communication does not change either. The two students do not
seem to be referring to the same things even though at least one of them, Ari, gives the impression
of a person who knows pretty well what he is talking about. A disciplined focal analysis confirms
this impression.
The flow of the Ari’s tripartite focus has been charted in Figure 11. Probably the most salient
feature of the boy’s talk is its being tightly integrated by the intended focus. Although the different
utterances are built around different pronounced foci, and imply differing attended foci, they all
speak either on slope or intercept of the same linear function. It is remarkable how confidently Ari
moves on, knowing what to look at and what calculations to make, in spite of the fact that he keeps
confounding the words “slope” and “intercept.” We may say that Ari’s discourse is well inte-
grated along the axes of intended and attended foci, and thus resistant to the pronounced focus
failures. For Gur the situation is dramatically different. As can be felt while listening to the con-
versation, and as has been shown with clarity by our detailed analysis of the focus flow (see Figure
12), Ari’s partner cannot move with the same ease between table and formula, and his attended fo-
cus is extremely sensitive to changes of pronounced focus. In fact, in the first sub-episode Gur
does not show any initiative of his own and he seems to understand very little of what Ari is say-
22
The first Slope sub-episode is an exception in that Gur precedes Ari in the transition to the next problem. This excep-
tion does not contradict the rule. It seems that Gur already understood from his former experience with Ari that such transi-
tion is going to happen anyway, so he rushes to do it simply to spare himself further unpleasantness.
FIGURE 10 The structure of the Slope episode.
FIGURE 11 Slope episode: Analysis of Ari’s tripartite focus.
ing. The conversation, as presented in Figure 12, is unintegrated, and the discourse along Gur’s
private channel is unfocused and discontinuous.
Although Ari does make several attempts to overcome the obvious incoherence by explicitly
pointing to his attended foci, his attempts do not work. Pointing to the attended focus, per se, is not
enough to create an intended focus. We can see two possible reasons for the ineffectiveness of
Ari’s intervention. First, Ari does not really try to coordinate intended and attended foci—he just
points to the table or to the formula without specifying the attending procedures. Second, Ari does
not probe Gur’s understanding. He seems so uninterested in his partner’s thinking that he does not
even notice Gur’s slips of pronounced focus or his erroneous answers.
In the attempt to get some sense of possible reasons for the miscommunication, let us now look
at the results of preoccupational analysis. A cursory glance at the interaction flowcharts in Figure
13 suffices to show that if there was any change in the patterns of Ari and Gur’s interactions, it
68 SFARD AND KIERAN
FIGURE 12 Slope episode: Analysis of focus flow.
must have been marginal. The general characteristics we identified in the Daylight episode return
in the present one with an even greater clarity: The diagrams reveal that Ari’s attitude is
unininitating and unresponsive, whereas Gur’s approach is the exact opposite. All this means that
whereas Ari is keen on protecting his thinking from distractions, Gur is preoccupied with the ex-
change of ideas. In this situation, it is not surprising that there are long stretches of continuity
along Ari’s private channel (see Figure 13, column A), whereas Gur’s private channel is practi-
cally nonexistent (see Figure 13, column B). As in the former episode, Ari tries to curb the dis-
course and, at the same time, to conceal this fact with different camouflaging techniques. Gur, in
his turn, has widened the assortment of his discourse-spurring and face-saving methods.
Thus, two-thirds of the course behind them, Ari and Gur do not seem to have gone far beyond the
point of departure. Twenty sessions together did not change much in the nature and quality of Ari
and Gur’s collaboration except, perhaps, pushing each of the boys further in his own direction: Ari
became even more effective in protecting his private channel and in preventing any real exchange,
and Gur became even more dependent on his interaction with Ari. The only real change that can be
noticed is a clear progress in Ari’s mathematical knowledge. Gur’s knowledge and understanding,
at least as revealed throughout his conversations with Ari, lags way behind that of his partner and
seems nowhere close to what we wanted our students to accomplish. The main reason for this state
of affairs, so it seems to us now, is the persistent ineffectiveness of the boys’ communication.
6. CONCLUSIONS: RETHINKING LEARNING-BY-TALKING
After the very detailed analysis carried out in this article, it is time to summarize and try to draw
more general conclusions. Because we focused on just two 12-year-old students and thoroughly
analyzed only two very brief episodes out of the 30 hr the two boys spent together in the span of 2
FIGURE 13 Slope episode: Interactivity flowchart.

70 SFARD AND KIERAN
months, one may feel that it would be imprudent to venture any generalization. We believe, how-
ever, that a close and detailed picture of one little sample may sometimes be more revealing than a
lengthy study with hundreds of participants. When using a microscope one may discover a whole
new world of complex relationships and rich phenomena. This is, we feel, what happened to us in
the present study. We believe that what has been presented in this article is, if nothing else, an “ex-
istence proof” of such a hidden universe. Our visit to this underground world of microphenomena
underlying students’ interactions proved highly consequential. What we managed to see with the
help of our two specially devised tools for analyzing students’ discourse compelled us to
reconceptualize some of our former beliefs about doing and learning mathematics.
6.1 On the Merits of Learning-by-Talking
Our initial decision to emphasize students’ classroom interactions was a pedagogical rather than
research choice. When launching our experiment, we believed that students’ collaboration and
mathematical conversation are the best ways to learn mathematics. We had much to say to support
this conviction. First, there was Vygotsky’s (1978, 1987) famous idea of the zone of proximal de-
velopment which fed our confidence about the advantages of interactions between students with
somewhat differing knowledge and skills. Second, new empirical and theoretical evidence was
mounting, showing the beneficial effects of students’ verbalizing on their mathematical thinking
(see, Lampert, 1990; Lampert & Cobb, in press; O’Connor, 1996, 1998). Finally, emphasizing
mathematical communication in schools has been a general pedagogical trend, and it seemed to be
well grounded and reasonably successful.
While having a close look at a pair of students working together, we realized that the merits of
learning-by-talking cannot be taken for granted. Our analyses compel us to conclude that if Gur
did make any real progress, it was not thanks to his collaboration with Ari but rather in spite of it,
and if this collaboration did, in the end, spur Gur’s development, it was probably mainly in an in-
direct way, by providing him with an incentive to learn. Our experiment has shown that the inter-
action between the two boys was unhelpful to either of them. The present study, therefore, does
not lend support to the common belief that working together can always be trusted to have a syner-
getic quality. It is not necessarily true that two people who join forces can do more than the sum of
what each one of them can do alone.
Ari and Gur’s collaboration seemed unhelpful because of the ineffectiveness of their commu-
nication. Our analysis has clearly confirmed what Reddy (1979) asserted quite a while ago: “Un-
derstanding without effort” is but a myth and human communication is subject to the law of
entropy. The road to mutual understanding is so winding and full of pitfalls that success in com-
munication looks like a miracle. And if effective communication is generally difficult to attain, in
mathematics it is a real uphill struggle. The scarcity of perceptual mediation and the inherent
polysemy of mathematical symbols can only be outweighed by extreme concentration. In this dis-
course, therefore, interaction with others, with its numerous demands on one’s attention, can often
be counterproductive. Indeed, it is very difficult to keep a well-focused conversation going when
also trying to solve problems and be creative about them. This is probably why mathematics made
its name throughout history as an activity for loners. Similarly, those who are supposed to learn
mathematics through conversation may often feel that, in fact, they would be better off on their
own. Strong motivation is necessary to engage in mathematical conversation and make it work.
Ari’s wish to communicate with Gur was evidently not merely insufficient; it might even be some-
how negative. Indeed, not only did he make satisfactory progress on his own, but he would proba-
bly work quicker and more effectively if not obliged to communicate with Gur at the same time. In
addition, it seems that even if Ari did want to help Gur, he did not have the appropriate means. All
these findings cast doubt upon the common belief that working with a “more knowledgeable part-
ner” speeds up one’s development as a rule.
6.2 What We Bring from this Study to the Classroom: On Ways to

Improve the Effectiveness and Didactic Productivity of Mathematical
Conversation
Let us make it clear: The bottom line of what we have said so far is not that mathematics cannot
or should not be learned in an interactive way. Our limited example could not have given rise to
such an extreme claim. Moreover, in a recent study focusing on two students involved in col-
laborative computer-supported mathematical explorations (Lavy, 2000), the same methods of
analysis have shown a kind of productive learning progress that would probably not have oc-
curred had the boys worked separately. Thus, based on theoretical arguments and ample evi-
dence from other research, we still believe in the didactic potential of talking mathematics. The
only reasonable conclusion of our analysis is that if conversation is to be effective and condu-
cive for learning, the art of communicating has to be taught. Based on our observations, we
were able to come up with a few ideas about the aspects of learning that should probably be de-
liberately fostered if we wish students to capitalize on mathematical conversation. Thus, for
example, we saw the importance of being precise in the pronounced focus and explicit in the at-
tended focus. Needless to say, this is only the beginning of the advice that can be given to those
who wish to learn by talking.
Although the focus of this study was on students talking to each other, communication between
the teacher and the learners should also be taken into account. It is noteworthy that our special
tools of analysis may be put to practical use as instruments for improving this latter type of inter-
action. For a teacher, an analyzed sample of her own interaction with students may have an
eye-opening quality. Such analysis would face her with certain recurrent, and possibly unhelpful,
patterns in her discursive conduct of which, so far, she might have been unaware. One glimpse of a
representative sample of classroom discourse may show, for example, whether she really listens
to the children or, like Ari, she hears nobody but herself.
6.3 The Role of Perceptual Mediation in Communication (and Thus

Thinking)
Focal analysis performed in this study gave us an insight into the way in which visual aspects medi-
ate communication and, more often than not, make it possible in the first place. Indeed, well de-
fined attended focus is crucial to the success of communication. We may now conclude that one of
the possibly most underrated skills that have to be fostered to enhance communication is the use of
perceptual mediators, that is the ability to develop helpful attended foci. In this paper we have seen
72 SFARD AND KIERAN
an example of an interaction in which perceptual mediation worked well only along one personal
channel (Ari’s), and failed along the interpersonal channel.23
It seems that the ability to use perceptual mediational means in a truly helpful manner does not
always develop spontaneously. More often than not one has to work hard to become able to con-
struct proper attended foci, that is, to learn to see things that must be seen if a given type of com-
munication is to be effective.24 This is true for any kind of discourse, with mathematical discourse
being no exception. In mathematical communication, in which there are no familiar visible ob-
jects likely to serve as a basis for an attended focus, people avail themselves of symbolic artifacts
as a replacement. As communication mediators, however, the symbolic substitutes are not as
readily effective as the familiar objects used in everyday discourse. Symbols may provide inter-
locutors with a handy attended focus but because of their inherent polysemy and extreme general-
ity their use as communication mediators is not as straightforward as that of familiar material
objects.
7. META-CONCLUSIONS:
RETHINKING OUR THINKING ON THINKING
What we saw in this study changed more than our opinion about learning-by-talking: It forced us
to revise the basic assumptions that guided us as researchers at the outset, when we were conceiv-
ing and then launching this study. In hindsight, we may say that what happened to us was very
much in the spirit of our times: Halfway through our study we were experiencing a paradigm
shift. Like so many other researchers, we felt that the research framework we were coming from
falls short in capturing certain vital aspects of learning, if not the gist of the whole process. We
ended up with some of our basic notions entirely reconceptualized and with certain old beliefs re-
vised or discarded.
7.1 On the Idea of Stand-Alone Cognition
Following our classroom observations, the issue of communication, supposed to be somehow

“auxiliary” to the proper topic of this study, came to the foreground and became the center of atten-
tion. Upon re-conceptualizing thinking as an instance of communicative activity we turned away
from the traditional cognitivist dichotomy between “contents of mind” and the things people say or
do (cf. Bruner, 1986; Sfard, 2000a, 2000b; Edwards & Potter, 1992; Harre & Gillett, 1995; Ed-
wards, 1997). We concluded that thinking is not a self-sustained factor that regulates communica-
tion; rather, it is an act of communication in itself, and must be studied as such.
Let us add that by choosing the activity of communication as our unit of analysis we were able
to overcome at least two traditional divisions that, at the earlier stage of our study, were barring
23
For an example of another successful interpersonal communication, analyzed with the same tools as those used here,
see Sfard, 2000b.
24
For analyses of the ways in which people discursively construct “professional vision,” that is the ability to see things
that other, non-skilled people would not be able to notice, see, for example, Goodwin (1994), Goodwin and Goodwin
(1996), Stevens and Hall (1998).
our insight into Ari and Gur’s learning interactions. First, we seem to have sidestepped the famous
split between individual and social research perspectives. As many writers have noted, this split
results in two incompatible and somehow incomplete types of studies (see, e.g., Cobb, 1996;
Confrey, 1994; Lerman, 1996). The problematic division simply disappears when one realizes
that the cognitivist and interactional approaches are but two ways of looking at what is basically
one and the same phenomenon: the phenomenon of communication.
Another time-honored dichotomy that also becomes pointless in our type of analysis is the split
between cognition and affect. A distant echo of this division may be found in our distinction be-
tween object level and meta-level communication, with cognitive factors finding their expression
in the former type of communication and the affect residing mainly at the “higher” level. How-
ever, because the incessant interaction and dialectic dependence between the different levels is the
main theme of this article, the untenability of the split between cognitive and affective factors be-
comes one of the central messages of this study.
Our special methods of analysis were designed to support this change of perspective. The final pic-
ture obtained by means of focal and preoccupation analysis is quite different from the one we came up
with by applying traditional, cognitivist methods of inquiry. In general, we find our new method trust-
worthy because the image of learning we were able to construct with its help fits with the intuitive per-
ception of the situation which grew in clarity and strength while we were watching the children in the
classroom.
7.2 On the Assessment of Students’ “Mathematical Ability”
It seems natural to state that some people are unsuccessful in mathematics because of the lack of
some special cognitive abilities. This is certainly the kind of verdict that we would be likely to
make about Gur if we had not watched him so closely. This close inspection of Gur’s actions made
us think that what we saw during our 30-hr-long experiment is not enough to make any kind of
judgment on the possibilities and limits of Gur’s mathematical performance. The only thing we can
reasonably assert is that during this entire period we never saw Gur in a direct interaction with
mathematics.
Judging from Gur’s final achievements, such interaction must have taken place at one time or
another. Since it did not happen during Gur’s sessions with Ari, it must have been when the boy
worked on his own—or during interviews. Intrigued with the issue, we made some inquires and
were told that that he worked at home, where he was sometimes helped by his father. All this cor-
roborated our classroom impressions. According to any standards, Gur seemed to us a rather
bright child, who had no apparent reason to have difficulty with such simple and immediate facts
as that the value of a function should be computed by substitution of a number into a formula. If
nothing else, facts like that can simply be memorized. It would sound rather unconvincing to
claim that Gur could not manage them because of his being mathematically handicapped. The pic-
ture that revealed itself to us in this study provides an alternative explanation. It has shown that
Gur was not really preoccupied with mathematics. Rather, he was concerned with interpersonal
matters, and this concern erected a glass wall between him and the mathematical problems. This
study taught us, therefore, to be careful when judging a student’s “mathematical potential.” Math-
ematical performance has been shown to be extremely sensitive to many seemingly unrelated fac-
74 SFARD AND KIERAN
tors; as such, it cannot be considered a simple function of some permanent characteristics of the
student.
Although what we got in this study is not exactly what we wanted to get, this story does have a
happy ending. While trying to summarize the result of the experiment presented in this article, we
found ourselves asking new questions, revising our former conceptions and beliefs about learn-
ing, and building new tools for discourse analysis. What was supposed to be a study about the ef-
fectiveness of certain ways of learning algebra turned into an investigation of conditions for the
effectiveness of students’ communication. Answering questions about discursive interactions and
about the possibility of their improvement required subjecting our basic beliefs about cognition
and communication to critical examination. We believe that our temporary confusion eventually
paid off in that it led to a new, more helpful, understanding of the initial questions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research presented in this article was made possible by a grant from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant #410-93-0605). The authors thank two anonymous
reviewers for their insightful comments.
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MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY, 8(1), 42–76

Cognition as Communication: Rethinking

1. INTRODUCTION: QUESTIONS ABOUT LEARNING-BY-TALKING

FIGURE 1 Daylight episode: Activity sheet.

2. PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON THINKING AS COMMUNICATING

FIGURE 3 Dialogue as a multilevel communication.

3. DO THEY COMMUNICATE? FOCAL ANALYSIS OF ARI AND GUR’S

3.1 What Is Focal Analysis?

FIGURE 4 The three-phase structure of the Daylight episode.

Ari: Dina’s hat is nice.

Gur: I think it is rather ugly.

3.2 Focal Analysis of the Daylight Episode

FIGURE 5 Ari’s and Gur’s tripartite foci.

4. WHY DON’T THEY COMMUNICATE? PREOCCUPATIONAL

4.1 A Few Words on the Concept of Preoccupation

4.2 What Is Preoccupational Analysis?

FIGURE 7 Interaction flowchart symbols.

2. Proactive arrow—an arrow pointing vertically or diagonally forward or downward: this

4.3 Preoccupational Analysis of Daylight Episode

4.4 Putting the Results of Focal and Preoccupational Analyses Together:

5. WILL THEY LEARN TO COMMUNICATE?

5.1 Focal and Preoccupational Analysis of Slope Episode

FIGURE 8 Slope episode: Activity sheet.

FIGURE 10 The structure of the Slope episode.

FIGURE 11 Slope episode: Analysis of Ari’s tripartite focus.

FIGURE 12 Slope episode: Analysis of focus flow.

6. CONCLUSIONS: RETHINKING LEARNING-BY-TALKING

FIGURE 13 Slope episode: Interactivity flowchart.

6.1 On the Merits of Learning-by-Talking

6.2 What We Bring from this Study to the Classroom: On Ways to

6.3 The Role of Perceptual Mediation in Communication (and Thus

7.1 On the Idea of Stand-Alone Cognition

Following our classroom observations, the issue of communication, supposed to be somehow

7.2 On the Assessment of Students’ “Mathematical Ability”

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