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Language development is intensely imbricated with the development of one's social being, one's relations and cooperations with others, one's feelings of security and anxiety, one's full range of emotions, one's emotional connectedness and distances with others, and one's conscious view of oneself and others. Any adequate account of writing would see each of these issues at play in every text we write and read. Indeed, much literary interpretation examines such issues in a limited domain of texts where imagination is at free play. To understand these issues at work in other kinds of texts, it makes sense to look at the deep role of language in the formation of the self, which shapes the face one presents to the world and the inner self that seeks various forms of cooperation and relation to others. These issues are crucial for all writing education, because learning to write means learning to take on a bold presence in the world and enter into complex and sophisticated relations with others, whether one writes accountancy reports, ambassadorial greetings, journalistic accounts, or sociological studies. Students' development as writers is saturated with issues of identity, affect, elation, and one's place in the world.
A number of traditions have considered the relation of language development to the formation of social, communicative, active selves. Among those are the phenomenological tradition leading to microinteractional sociology (Heritage), the Soviet sociocultural tradition, which has spawned the more recent activity theory (Wertsch, Vygotsky, Luria, Cole, Engestrom), the eighteenth-century Scottish moralist and dissident traditions (Smith and Priestley, for examples), leading to the foundations of modern liberalism, and the American pragmatist tradition.
In the American pragmatist tradition, George Herbert Mead and John Dewey saw language development and social interaction as crucial in the formation of self, and they greatly influenced the founder of linguisti