Perspectives: Tools of Recursion, Intermental Zones of Proximal Development, and Critical Collaborative Autonomy

Exploratory teaching (Allwright, 1991) was conducted in a)apanese university EFL course in which students were asked to study themselves as learners in participatory action research (Auerbach, 1994). Weekly student commentary shows how reflection-in-action, reflection-on-action (Schon, 1987), and reflection literacy (Hasan, 1996) were encouraged by the recursive microdiscursive tools of shadowing and summarizing while recording conversations, and by the recursive reflective tools of action-logging and newsletters. Highlighting student voices through newsletters seemed to enrich the participants' sense of a common intermental space in which to negotiate and scaffold meaning. These tools of recursion helped students manifest what their minds were modeling, making comprehensible what they were thinking to themselves and to others, and create overlapping intermental zones of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1934). Comments from student action logs are used to support the idea that inter mental interaction can lead toward critical collaborative autonomy (Murphey &)acobs, 2(00).