by Rod Ellis
Table 9.2 Cognitive and social SLA compared
So far, we have painted a picture of social SLA as a uniform approach, but in fact there are a number of different theories that lay claim to being ‘social’. To some extent, these theories do share a common epistemology, as portrayed in Table 9.2: in particular, they all provide socially-oriented explanations of language learning; they all aim to provide local, situated accounts of learning; and they all reject the cognitivist view that ‘use’ and ‘acquisition’ are distinct. However, as Atkinson (2011b) pointed out, these theories have been developed in isolation from each other, drawing on very different epistemological bases. One clear difference lies in how the theories conceptualize ‘language’. In some of the theories, the focus is on how learners use and acquire specific linguistic features and—in this respect—they accord with cognitive approaches. In other theories, however, the emphasis is more on the learner’s social world—how relations of power affect opportunities for language learning or on how social forms of knowledge needed to become a member of a language community are developed. I will begin by examining theories that are clearly socio-cognitive in nature and conclude with theories that are more purely social.
Sociocultural SLA
Sociocultural accounts of L2 acquisition pre-dated the advent of the ‘social turn’ in SLA: the first (Frawley and Lantolf) appearing in 1985. Lantolf—the person most closely associated with sociocultural SLA—was also one of the first to critique the competence-performance dichotomy that lies at the heart of cognitive SLA. In Lantolf (1996), for example, he disputed the idea of the human mind as ‘containing’ the knowledge that results from processing linguistic input and argued for broadening the scope of SLA by ‘letting all the flowers grow’. Subsequently, however, Lantolf has single-mindedly promoted sociocultural SLA and challenged many of the precepts on which cognitive SLA is based, including what he called the Universal Acquisition Hypothesis (Lantolf 2011), namely the claim that the acquisition of L2 grammar follows a natural and universal route (see Chapter 4).
Vygotsky
Sociocultural SLA draws extensively on the work of the Russian psychologist Vygotsky (1978). Whereas Piaget saw cognitive development as involving progression through a set of universal and biologically determined stages—analogous, in some ways, to the order and sequence of development in L2 acquisition we examined in Chapter 4—Vygotsky viewed development as arising out of the interaction between biologically endowed abilities and culturally organized artefacts. Our biological inheritance equips us with lower mental functions of the same kind as are found in some primates; our higher mental functioning, however—for example, memory, attention, rational thinking—develops through the ‘interweaving of our cultural and biological inheritances’ (Lantolf and Thorne 2006: 59). Sociocultural theory aims to explicate the nature of this ‘interweaving’
For Vygotsky, then, the pattern of cognitive development is not predetermined as the potential always exists to bring about cognitive change through external means. In his own research with children, Vygotsky emphasized the importance of examining what children do when they are given a task that is beyond their current level of development along with some form of external assistance to help them solve it. His interest lay in studying how children make use of this assistance and how over time they internalize the assistance to the point where they no longer need it.
Drawing on these ideas, sociocultural SLA has focused on learning-as-a-process rather than leaning-as-a-product by investigating the use that learners make of the assistance available to them. Learning is both a social and cognitive process in sociocultural theory because new concepts (including new linguistic forms) originate in social interaction and are only subsequently internalized as mental schemata.
Mediation
Lantolf and Thorne (2006) define mediation as ‘the process through which humans deploy culturally constructed artefacts, concepts, and activities to regulate—i.e. gain voluntary control over and transform—the material world or their own and each other’s social and mental activity’ (p. 79). Mediation involves the use of ‘tools’ that help learners to perform a task which they cannot perform successfully with their existing linguistic resources.
Let me give an example. A beginner-level learner was shown a card depicting a man holding an umbrella with rain falling onto the man inside the umbrella and asked to say what is wrong with the picture. The learner lacked the vocabulary to accomplish this task. The learner might have made use of a ‘culturally constructed artefact’—a bilingual dictionary—to access the necessary L2 vocabulary to mediate her performance of the task. However, this was not available. Instead, she performed the task with the help of her teacher. In other words, the mediation took the form of social activity. Extract 1 below shows what transpired. The learner demonstrated independent control only over one of the words she needed to perform the task (‘man’) but the teacher helped her to produce two other key words—’raining’, which she repeated after the teacher, and ‘umbrella’ which she was able to say with the help of a prompt from the teacher. In socio-cultural terms, we can see learning-as-a process taking place. Interestingly, when this learner performed the same task two weeks later, she was able to produce both ‘raining’ and ‘umbrella’ without assistance from the teacher. In other words, she had now gained ‘voluntary control’ over the use of these words. We see here how the other-regulation evident in Extract 1 transformed into self-regulation at a later time. Clearly, though, further mediation was needed to enable this learner to perform the whole task successfully.
Extract (1)
1 T Look at this one.
2 L Man and a …
3 T What’s it doing?
4 It’s …
5 It’s raining.
6 T Huh?
7 L Raining.
8 T Raining.
9 T What’s the man holding in his hand?
10 T D’you know what this is called?
11 Begins with ‘u’ – ‘um …’
12 L (sounds of trying to remember) Umbrella.
13 T Umbrella, yes.
14 T And where’s the rain coming from?
15 L Water.
16 T Water yes. Where from?
17 T Is it inside or outside the umbrella?
18 L No.
19 T Yeah, should be outside, yes?
Social interaction serves as the primary means for mediating learning. In the case of the example above, the mediation was provided by an expert (i.e. a teacher), but learners can also mediate each other’s learning. Ohta (2001) identified four major mediating devices that learners use: waiting; prompting; co-construction; and explanation. In a study of peer interaction in a Japanese as a foreign language classroom in the United States, Ohta found that ‘peer interlocutors tend to provide their partners with ample wait time’ (p. 89). Prompting was a more explicit technique involving repeating a word or syllable just uttered, thereby helping the interlocutor to continue. Co-construction consisted of one learner contributing some linguistic material (a word, phrase or grammatical particle) to complete another learner’s previous utterance. Explanations, often provided in the L1, were used to address errors the partner had made.
Individual learners can also mediate their own L2 use and learning through private speech. Ohta (2001) defined private speech as ‘audible speech not adapted to an addressee’ (p. 16). She suggested that it can take a number of forms including imitation, vicarious response as when a classroom learner produces a response to a question the teacher has addressed to another learner, and mental rehearsal. The defining characteristic of private speech is not whether it is silent but whether it is self-directed. Children frequently resort to talking to themselves, even when they are in the company of others (Saville-Troike 1988). Adults do this too, but, in many cases, their private speech is silent. L2 learners may resort to the use of their L1 in self-directed speechNOTE 2.
There is a close relationship between social and private speech.
Lantolf (2011) explained the relationship in this way:
In its communicative function, language entails interaction between ‘I’ and ‘You’. Eventually, however, a new function emerges, in which conversation becomes intrapsychological, i.e. between ‘I’ and ‘Me’, where ‘I’ formulates plans and makes decisions and ‘Me’ (the counterpart of ‘You’ in social interaction) evaluates, critiques, and revises these as necessary (p. 25–6).
This quotation reveals two important points. Firstly, both social and private speech are forms of interaction. However, there are differences: private speech is not constrained by the same norms that affect social speech; even if learners can use the correct target language forms in social speech, they may not do so in self-directed speech. Thus what may appear to be ‘errors’ may simply be the private forms that learners use in their struggle to maintain control over a task (Frawley and Lantolf 1985). The second point is that interpersonal mediation through social talk serves to establish intrapersonal mediation through private speech (i.e. what requires social mediation at one time can be handled by means of private speech at a later time). Perhaps, though, the reverse is also possible. Learners may rehearse privately before attempting social speech. In a study of Japanese children in an American kindergarten, Saville-Troike (1988) found that only those children who engaged actively in self-directed talk for a period went on later to participate in social talk.
There is also another type of mediation—concept mediation. Lantolf (2011) defined concepts as ‘the meanings that cultures construct to make sense of the world’ (p. 32). He distinguished two types of concepts: every-day/spontaneous concepts and scientific concepts. The former are learned by observing entities and events as these appear to our senses in the social world. They involve only superficial learning as the concepts so attained operate below the level of full consciousness: the vocabulary learning that took place in Extract 1 above might be considered an example of this. In contrast, scientific concepts are highly explicit and available for conscious manipulation and analysis. Their power lies in their generative capacity i.e. they are generalizable across diverse situations. Unlike everyday/spontaneous concepts, scientific concepts require some kind of educational intervention such as concept-based instruction where learners are given very precise ‘scientific’ descriptions of grammatical rules to mediate their learning (see Chapter 10).
To sum up, all learning is mediated. That is, learning is initially an external phenomenon that is other-regulated and only later becomes internalized when self-regulation takes place. Thus, the primary focus in research in sociocultural SLA is on the process by which concepts are mediated. Different types of mediators have been identified: cultural artefacts (such as dictionaries); social interaction; private speech (itself an internalized form of social interaction); and scientific concepts made available through education. Primary among these is social interaction. As Lantolf (2011) put it, ‘mediation is realized through social, largely communicative interaction’ (p. 37).
Zone of Proximal Development
There are two levels of development: ‘the actual developmental level, that is the level of development of the child’s mental functions that has been established as a result of certain already completed developmental cycles’ (Vygotsky 1978: 85) and the level of potential development as demonstrated in problem solving undertaken with the assistance of an adult (an expert) or through collaboration with peers (novices). There is also a third level where a particular mental function lies beyond the learner, even if mediation is available. The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is the second of these levels; the level of potential development. To use Vygotsky’s own metaphor, it is the ‘bud’ rather than the ‘fruit’ of development.
The ZPD is a key construct in sociocultural theory. It works ‘by achieving through collaborative mediation what is unachievable alone’ (Lantolf 2011: 29). In other words, the ZPD is not so much a cognitive level present in the mind of the learner, but a socially constructed activity. As Newman and Holzman (1997) put it ‘the ZPD is not a place at all; it is an activity… .’ (p. 289). Thus, it is not equivalent to the built-in syllabus that the learner is pre-ordained to follow, as claimed by some cognitively-oriented researchers (for example, Corder 1967; Krashen 1981). There are of course developmental limitations on the possibility of constructing a ZPD with a learner, but these are not universal; they vary from one learner to another. Success in constructing a ZPD depends very much on the quality of the mediation provided. The ZPD, then, far from supporting the Universal Acquisition Hypothesis, actually challenges it.
Aljaafreh and Lantolf’s (1994) study of corrective feedback illustrates the application of the ZPD in SLA (see Table 9.3). Lantolf (2011) listed the important findings of this study: (1) It showed that different learners benefit from qualitatively different types of mediation (i.e. more implicit or explicit corrective feedback) for the same grammatical structure; (2) individual learners may require different types of mediation for different grammatical features depending on their developmental level; (3) mediation needs to be withheld sometimes to establish whether learners have achieved independent control over a feature; and (4) evidence that learning has occurred consists of showing that a lower level of mediation (in this case, more implicit corrective feedback) can achieve other-regulation than at an earlier time (when more explicit feedback was needed). This last point is of special importance as it offers a radically different view of what learning involves to the standard cognitive view which emphasizes the importance of demonstrating (often through tests) that a learner has achieved full independent control over a linguistic feature.
Purpose To investigate how the negotiation of corrective feedback in the ZPD promotes learning
Participants Three students with different levels of L2 proficiency enrolled in an eight-week ESL writing-and-reading course; a researcher who was not an instructor.
Procedures The students wrote an initial essay which was used to identify grammatical structures that were problem areas. Students then wrote a number of essays and participated in one-on-one tutorials with the researcher. Before the tutorials began, the students were asked to underline any errors and correct them if they could. The tutorials consisted of the researcher working collaboratively with the students to help them correct the errors.
Corrective feedback The nature of the corrective feedback the researcher provided was not pre-determined. Rather the researcher worked collaboratively with individual students to help them self-correct their errors. This typically involved beginning by directing the learner’s attention to a sentence containing an error and asking a general question (e.g. ‘Do you notice any problem here?’) If this failed to elicit a self-correction, the researcher used increasingly more explicit strategies (e.g. ‘pay attention to the tense of the verb’). Only if necessary did the researcher correct the error himself.
Analysis To measure development over time in the learners, four levels were distinguished. (1) The learner failed to even notice an error. (2) The learner noticed an error but failed to correct it even with assistance. (3) The learner noticed and corrected an error but only after other-regulation. (4) The learner noticed and corrected the error with minimal intervention from the researcher but still repeated the same error later. (5) The learner was able to use the target structure correctly in all contexts.
Results The results were presented in terms of detailed analyses of the interactions that took place between the individual learners and the researcher at different times. Although not pre-planned, the feedback provided by the researcher reflected a regulatory scale ranging from very implicit to very explicit use of corrective strategies. The learning evident in the students was clearly a collaborative and dynamic endeavour. Development was reflected in progression from one level to another and reflected changes in the extent of the other-regulation required.
Table 9.3 Summary of Aljaafreh and Lantolf’s (1994) study of second language learning in the Zone of Proximal Development
Subsequent work on learning in the ZPD has involved dynamic assessment. In Poehner and Lantolf (2005), learners constructed a past tense oral narrative in French after watching a short video clip. They were given no feedback or mediation in this first task. Then they repeated the task after watching a second clip. This time ‘they interacted with a mediator who offered suggestions, posed questions, made corrections, and helped them think through decisions concerning selection of lexical items, verb tense, and other language difficulties’ (p. 246). This interactive assistance, which was provided in the learner’s L1, was ‘highly flexible, emerging from the interaction between the student and the mediator’ (p. 14). Poehner and Lantolf showed how the native-speaker interlocutor varied the specific mediating strategies he used at different times with the same learner and also with different learners. For example, in the case of one learner, he initially used quite direct clues (for example, ‘in the past’) and subsequently, when addressing the same linguistic problem, more indirect means (for example, ‘there’s something there with the verb’). Poehner (2008) reported a four-month study of dynamic assessment. This included an examination of what Poehner called ‘transcendence’—i.e. the ability of the learner to appropriate the mediation provided in the performance of one task to the performance of a new and more complex task. This study provided evidence of the development of full self-regulation where learners were able to generalize what they had learned to challenging new contexts.