Private speech: a study of language for thought in the collaborative interaction of language learners

This article analyzes the speech of English‐speaking college students of Spanish working in pairs to produce compositions in Spanish. Although there was considerable variability in the frequency of private speech from one dyad to another, the main goal of the study was to analyze those instances of private speech that could be clearly identified by both linguistic and paralinguistic evidence. Eight such excerpts are analyzed and discussed here. The analysis reveals that private speech of the participants facilitated two fundamental cognitive operations: focusing of attention and the creation of psychological distance. That is, private speech enabled the participants to concentrate on the task at crucial moments and to distance themselves from the problems they encountered, thereby achieving a perspective that in turn helped them to gain control in the performance of the task. It is argued that private speech that occurs in a social context can be identified and analyzed, and ultimately distinguished from social speech.