Lev Vygotsky

Born: Belarus, 19 November, 1896
Died: Moscow, 11 June, 1934

Vygotsky argued that children learn most effectively through social interaction with people more knowledgeable than themselves when they are involved in jointly solving problems and constructing new understandings within their Zone of Proximal Development.  He put great importance on the place of social interaction in the cognitive and language development of children, since he argued that it is through everyday problem-solving and tasks that socially mediated dialogue is gradually internalised and becomes an inner, personalised resource for the child's own thinking and ability to perform competently on their own.

Source: TYLEC handout.


Microgenesis = the moment-to-moment co-construction of language and language-learning.
Development of competency for a task or activity.

To Vygotsky, all fundamental cognitive activities take shape in a matrix of social history and form the products of sociohistorical development.  That is "cognitive skills and patterns of thinking are not primarily determined by innate factors, but are the products of the activities practiced in the social institutions of the culture in which the individuals grows up.  Consequently, the history of the society in which a child is reared and the child's personal history are crucial developments of the way in which that individual will think.  In this process of cognitive development, language is a crucial tool for determining how the child will learn to think because advanced modes of thought are transmitted to the child by means of words" (Schutz, 2002). 

This is the underpinning of Vygotsky's "social constructivist" or "sociocultural" approach to language acquisition.  This squarely places him outside of Chomsky's innatist position and firmly in the "interactionist" framework of language acquisition.

Regulation, the ZPD and Scaffolding

Children's cognitive development is regulated, facilitated and enhanced through their interaction with more advanced and capable individuals, such as a parent, a teacher, or an older sibling.

Successful learning takes place when the child takes over, or appropriates, new knowledge or skills by shifting from inter-mental activity to intra-mental activity.

ZPD = the range of tasks that children cannot yet perform on their own, but may learn with the help of others or "the difference between the child's developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the higher level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers."

This process of supportive dialogue, or assisted learning, which directs the attention of the learner to the key features of the environment, and which prompts them through successive steps of a problem was labeled by Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) as "scaffolding".


The teacher's role is to elevate a learner's level to the ZPD.  Once appropriated, the new skills or knowledge can be self-regulated by the learner.

Scaffolding involves the following functions (Ellis, 1998):
1.  recruiting interest in the task;
2.  simplifying the task;
3.  maintaining pursuit of the goal;
4.  marking critical features and discrepancies between what has been produced and the ideal solution;
5.  controlling frustration during problem solving;
6.  demonstrating an idealized version of the act to be performed

Donato (1994) "scafolded performance is a dialogically constituted interpsycholigical mechanism that promotes the novice's internalisation of knowledge co-constructed in shared activity."

Sociocultural theory explains language as a tool for learning and thought creation; it is a functional description of the use of language and the thought process by which knowledge is constructed. 

Interaction and Second Language Learning

Dialogue can be viewed as both a means of communication AND a cognitive tool.  There is evidence of language being used as both an enactment of mental processes and as an occasion for L2 learning. 

Language is both communicative and cognitive, i.e. for communicating and thinking.  Language is process and product. 

The activity of negotiation leads to comprehensible input.

The expectation that cognitive activity will be apparent in dialogue is supported by the work of Vygotsky and other more recent sociocultural theorists, who argue that cognitive processes arise from the interaction that occurs between individuals.

Higher psychological processes unique to humans can be acquired only through

interaction with others, that is, through interpsychological processes that only

later will begin to be carried out independently by the individual.     When this

happens, some of these processes lose their initial, external form and are

converted into intrapersonal processes.

Learning does not occur outside performance, it occurs in performance.  Furthermore learning is cumulative, emergent and ongoing, sometimes occurring in leaps, while at other times it is imperceptible.

References:

Geerson, E. (2006) An Overview of Vygotsky's Language and Thought for EFL Teachers, Language Institute Journal 41, Volume 3, 41-61

Schutz, R. (March 2002) Vygotsky and language acquisition.  http://sk.com.br/sk-vygot.html

Swain, M. & Lapkin, S. (1998) Interaction and Second Language Learning: Two Adolescent French Immersion Students Working Together. The Modern Language Journal, 82, iii

Wood, D., Bruner, J. & Ross, G. (1976) The role of tutoring in problem solving.  In R. Mitchell & F. Myles. Second language learning theories (p. 147) London: Edward Arnold.