The Ecology of Language Learning and Sociocultural Theory
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THE ECOLOGY OF LANGUAGE LEARNING AND SOCIOCULTURAL THEORY
INTRODUCTION
Sociocultural theory (SCT) has received a significant level of prominence in educational circles and in language education over the past two decades or so (Lantolf and Appel, 1994; Moll, 1990). Historically speaking it is based directly on the work of Vygotsky and his colleagues or students (e.g., A.A. Leontiev, A.R. Luria, and P.Y. Galperin; for a recent overview see Kozulin, Gindis et al., 2003), but it has also (and increasingly) found connections with other work in various parts of the world, for example Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori, John Dewey, G.H. Mead, and Jerome Bruner. Key features of Vygotsky’s SCT are mediation, activity, the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and the relationship between learning and development. Other areas that receive increasing attention are inner speech, scaffolding (although this term should be referenced to Bruner, e.g., Bruner and Sherwood, 1975), dynamic assessment, activity theory, agency and the use of tools and signs (this relates to mediation). It must be noted (see also Kozulin, Gindis, Ageyev, and Miller, 2003; Valsiner and van der Veer, 2000; Wertsch, 1991) that Vygotsky left a hugely impressive body of work, but at the same time this body of work remained unfinished at the time of his early death at the age of 37. There are a number of aspects of the work that the researcher of the early twenty-first century needs to adapt, expand, interpret, and integrate with recent advances in education, linguistics, sociology, and psychology. Vygotsky’s work is not a finished body of work that must be accepted as is and that should not be added to in any way. It was very much work in progress, cut short in an untimely manner as mentioned earlier. We therefore owe it to the memory of Vygotsky to place his unparalleled insights and achievements in the context of the current time and strengthen the original ideas with new but compatible sources of theory and practice. In this contribution I aim to do so by viewing SCT from within an ecological worldview. It is not my intention to systematically compare SCT and the ecology of language learning side by side to list the similarities and differences (see van Lier, 2004, Chapter 1, for a short A. Creese, P. Martin and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 9: Ecology of Language, 53–65. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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attempt at doing so). Rather, I will sketch some central ecological themes and place them within an SCT perspective. THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENTS: PERCEPTION AND ACTION
Central to an ecological approach to language learning are the processes of perceiving, and the insight that perception and action go together. The latter insight is largely credited to the work of James Gibson on the ecology of visual perception (1979). As Gibson explains (1979, p. 1), there are three basic modes of seeing: 1. Snapshot (an immobile perceiver) 2. Ambient (a perceiver looking around) 3. Ambulatory
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