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Masters in Applied Linguistics and TESOL

Masters in Applied Linguistics and TESOL

Introduction

The learning of a second language is a multifaceted endeavor. In order to fully understand this phenomenon, one must consider what is learned and what is not learned, as well as the contexts in which that learning and nonlearning take place. However, whereas all of these approaches to acquisition are crucial in dealing with a part of what happens in learning a second language, none of them alone is able to account for the total picture.Second Language Acquisition Methodologies

In second language education, we have been told to abandon drills and to focus on the learners, providing them with as many opportunities as possible for interaction, specifically negotiated interaction. Although presumably both our general education classes and our second language classes are the better for such innovations, there is a sense that we still lack a framework that is consistent, coherent, and cohesive enough to encompass all that we know or think we know about the second language acquisition (SLA) process.Vygotskian Model of SLA

One theory that offers great potential for providing these needed qualities is that forwarded by Vygotsky and his followers. Although their analysis of cognitive and linguistic development is not new, its applicability to SLA theory and practice has only recently begun to be explored (see Schinke-Llano, 1993). In order for one to appreciate fully the significance of Vygotskian thought to the SLA process, several concepts need to be elaborated. First and foremost, this is a sociocultural theory; it holds that human development cannot be viewed independently of its social context. Rather, development occurs as the result of meaningful verbal interaction, that is, of dialogic relationships between novices and experts in the environment, be they parents, older peers, or teachers (Vygotsky, 1962, 1978). The theory recognizes the nonlinear nature of development: Learners both progress and regress as they develop. It focuses on processes and changes, not on products and states; and it acknowledges that each stage of development subsumes the previous one and that potentially development never ceases.

Critical to this development is the notion of the zone of proximal development, mentioned earlier, which is "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with peers" (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86). In order for learners to progress through the ZPD, they must move from object-regulation (a stage in which the facts of the environment control the learner) to other-regulation (in which an "expert" mediates by providing strategies) and finally to self-regulation (in which the learner controls the activity) (Wertsch, 1979). Important to the emergence of self-regulation is the use of private speech (or private dialogue, as Wertsch, 1980 refers to it); such vocalized inner speech surfaces in times of psychic stress and represents an effort on the part of the individual to regain control of the task situation (McCafferty, 1992, 1993).

As a learner progresses from object-regulation to other-regulation to self-regulation, ...