Vygotsky's sociocultural theory

What it says

For Vygotsky, learning is social before it is private. A child solves a problem out loud with an adult, then alone with a mutter, then silently. The thinking did not appear from inside. It moved in from the conversation.

That gives his best known idea, the zone of proximal development. It is the gap between what a learner can do alone and what the same learner can do with help from somebody who knows more. Teaching that lands in the gap does work. Teaching below it is a review, and teaching above it is noise.

Culture supplies the tools. Counting systems, maps, writing and the words of a language are not decorations on thought; they shape what thinking is possible. This is why Vygotsky put the development of speech at the center of the development of thought.

The four moving parts

The theory is a set of claims about where a new ability comes from.

1. The zone of proximal development

   The band between what a learner manages alone and what they manage with help. Instruction aims there.

2. The more knowledgeable other

   A parent, a teacher or a classmate who is further along. The help can come from a peer, which is why pair work earns its place.

3. Language as the tool

   Talk between people becomes private speech, then inner speech. A child talking through a task is not distracted. That is the mechanism working.

4. Internalization

   What was shared becomes the learner's own. The help then has to fade, or the ability never becomes theirs.

Where it came from

Vygotsky worked in Moscow in the 1920s and early 1930s and died in 1934, at 37, of tuberculosis. His work was pushed aside in the Soviet Union for decades and reached English readers late. Thought and Language appeared in English in 1962, and the collection called Mind in Society in 1978.

The word most people meet first, scaffolding, is not his. David Wood, Jerome Bruner and Gail Ross coined it in 1976, for the support a tutor gives and then removes. It has been read back into Vygotsky ever since.

What holds up, and what does not

The core practical claim has support. Guided practice and peer tutoring beat leaving a learner to work it out. What a learner manages with help is a better forecast of next month than what they manage alone today. That last point is the basis of dynamic assessment, which tests a learner twice with a lesson in between.

The weakness is that the theory is broad. Vygotsky left sketches and arguments rather than finished experiments. The zone is not a quantity anybody can measure in units. Much of the detail was filled in by later researchers, who disagree with each other. It is a frame that has proved useful, not a tested model.

What it does not mean

It does not say a learner cannot work alone, and it is not an argument against practice by yourself. The help in the theory is help that fades. A learner who is still being carried has not finished learning.

Check yourself

Three questions on what is above. Each answer says why.

1. Pick the statement that describes the zone of proximal development.

   1. What a learner can do with no help at all
   2. The gap between what a learner can do alone and what they can do with help
   3. The age at which a skill normally appears
   Show the answer

   Answer: B. The zone is the band between alone and assisted. Teaching inside it is the point of the idea.

2. A child mutters the steps of a problem to themselves while working. On Vygotsky's account, what is happening?

   1. Private speech, on its way to becoming inner speech
   2. A sign the task is too hard
   3. A habit with no role in the thinking
   Show the answer

   Answer: A. Talk between people becomes private speech and then silent inner speech. The muttering is the middle of that move.

3. Who gave us the word scaffolding?

   1. Vygotsky, in Thought and Language
   2. Wood, Bruner and Ross, in 1976
   3. Piaget, in his work on schemas
   Show the answer

   Answer: B. Scaffolding is a 1976 term for support that is removed as the learner takes over. It fits the theory but it is not Vygotsky's word.

Sources

1. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press.
2. Vygotsky, L. S. (1934, English edition 1986). Thought and Language. MIT Press.
3. Wood, D., Bruner, J. S., and Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17(2).

Practice it on Learn

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