Bakhtin’s work offers a somewhat di

Bakhtin’s work offers a somewhat different perspective from those I have sum- marised. Working in Russia during the Soviet era, Bakhtin was primarily a literary theorist—he was interested, for example, in what makes a novel a novel and not, say, poetry. His examination of questions relating to literature led him to develop a highly distinctive theory of language. In particular, his thinking about language is relational rather structural (cf. Holquist 1981). For example, he was more inter- ested in the relationship between actual utterances and the contexts that affect how they are interpreted, than in a structural account of meaning or context. His work is also notable for its attention to the great diversity of language as it is used. Bakhtin’s ideas have not been widely influential in mathematics education, although traces are apparent in Sfard’s (2008) thinking