![]()
1
Introduction
James P. Lantolf, Matthew E. Poehner, and Merrill Swain
The publication of this handbook would have no doubt struck an observer from the early 20th century as highly improbable. That ideas formulated by a Russian psychologist in the 1920s and 30s would continue to be discussed into the 21st century and would influence so many fields, including scholarship concerned with second language (L2) development, would have almost certainly been met with incredulity. Nonetheless, the 35 chapters in this handbook are a testament to the unique vision and enduring influence of L. S. Vygotsky.
Referred to in the L2 field as sociocultural theory (SCT), Vygotsky’s theory owes its name to his primary conviction that human consciousness is mediated through signs. As he explained it, the lower forms of consciousness, which humans share with other animals, in particular primates, are transformed as we engage in activities with others and come to appropriate the meanings available to us in our social and cultural (including resources that have been created and passed down in a community) environment. Our use of semiotic resources, initially through interaction with others but also subsequently internally, or through interaction with the self, is the process through which we gain control over our psychological functioning. The higher forms of consciousness, as Vygotsky (1986) described them, are the result of our internalization of sociocultural mediation.
It would be redundant to delve deeply into the major constructs of SCT as Part I of the handbook includes individual papers on topics such as mediation and internalization, zone of proximal development (ZPD), and perezhivanie, among others, that were written by leading scholars of the theory who have grappled with those concepts for an extended period of time. Our Introduction instead situates Vygotsky and his theory in the historical and cultural context from which they emerged, traces the theory’s rediscovery decades later, and discusses its flourishing in the West in a number of disciplines. We give particular consideration to the theory’s adoption by L2 researchers and the strands of SCT research that have been pursued by scholars in that field. This sets the stage for the collection of papers included in this handbook, which are overviewed at the end of this Introduction.
Background: L. S. Vygotsky and His Sociocultural Theory of Mind
The unlikely story of Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Development begins with Vygotsky himself. The Russia in which Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky was born in 1896 was a society on the verge of change as rapid industrialization was transforming the nation’s economy. The country would soon become embroiled in the First World War, and political movements were gaining inroads that would eventually result in revolutions, the end of the Romanov dynasty, and the establishment of the Soviet state. It was an era that, as Vygotsky’s close colleague A. R. Luria (1979, p. 19) recollected, represented hope to many for a better future:
The promise of a more egalitarian society must have been alluring to Vygotsky, given the discrimination he regularly encountered as a Jew living in the Pale of Settlement of highly anti-Semitic Tsarist Russia. Indeed, as van der Veer and Valsiner (1991, p. 6) explain, Vygotsky was almost denied entry to university when a lottery system was put into effect in order to limit the number of Jews matriculating to higher education. With his record of academic excellence rendered insufficient to secure him a seat at the University of Moscow, Vygotsky had to rely on good fortune. It is not difficult to imagine that such experiences of having one’s basic civil rights challenged would strengthen his commitment to an equitable society characterized by access to the means of personal development. This commitment would come to define his theoretical, empirical, and practical work.
Two other obstacles to the formation of Vygotsky’s legacy must be mentioned: his lack of formal training as a psychologist when he first began his investigations into consciousness and the fact that as a young man he had contracted tuberculosis while caring for his dying mother. The latter meant that Vygotsky was frequently in fragile health and ultimately succumbed to his illness as he neared his 38th year of life. Despite the barriers he had to confront, Vygotsky managed to leave behind a vision of human beings and their potential that is only partly articulated, a scientific psychology that is only roughly sketched, and implications for educational practice that are tantalizing in their possibilities. The incompleteness of Vygotsky’s work, along with the far-reaching consequences of his ideas, help to explain his enduring legacy as it has been the task of others—first his colleagues and students and, later, scholars inside and outside of Russia working in a range of disciplines—to take up the challenge of elaborating the theory and its relevance for improving the human condition. It is this spirit of extending and expanding the theory, while remaining committed to its central principles, that guides the work included in this handbook.
With regard to Vygotsky’s status as an outsider to psychology, this may have worked to his advantage, as he was able to arrive at a sober evaluation of the field, unhindered by allegiances to the various orientations that were in competition in the early years of the previous century. The result of his analysis, most fully explicated in The historical meaning of the crisis in psychology (Vygotsky, 1997b), provided Vygotsky an opportunity to formulate his own vision for the future of the discipline. As mentioned, Part I is devoted to in-depth discussion of the central tenets and concepts of SCT. Here we wish to note that the breadth and depth of Vygotsky’s knowledge, which ranged from philosophy and literature to medicine and natural sciences, enabled him to recognize the importance of situating the study of consciousness as a specific field of inquiry in relation to science more generally. As Davydov and Radzikhovskii (1985) observed, in addition to the contributions of Vygotsky’s empirical research, he also operated as a methodologist, concerned with identifying principles and concepts that could guide investigations, analyses, and practices in every area of psychology.
Unfortunately, as with many disciplines in the social sciences in particular, psychology continues to be a highly fragmented discipline with a wide array of theories, methodological orientations, and research foci. This might prompt contemporary readers to try to categorize Vygotsky as belonging primarily to a particular sub-discipline such as child psychology, educational psychology, developmental psychology, or cross-cultural psychology. His vision for a general science of psychology engages each of these areas. Moreover, his short career found him designing experiments with young children (Vygotsky, 1998), outlining how learners with various special needs could nonetheless develop their abilities by accessing mediation through alternative means (Vygotsky, 1990), and even pursuing cross-cultural research into the psychology of communities encountering schooling and literacy for the first time (Luria, 1976). Rather than limited forays into diverse areas of psychology, all of these activities, along with his clinical practice and his writings aimed at teachers, are unified by Vygotsky’s conviction that human consciousness can be properly understood through gaining access to processes of its formation over time, a key methodological notion that he adopted from Marx’s approach to the study of capitalist society.
Vygotsky’s work could have easily died with him under the repressive regime of Stalin’s Soviet Union, given that research that was not perceived to support the ideology of the Communist Party was censored, and scholars who challenged Soviet orthodoxy were dismissed from academic posts, arrested, or even worse (van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991). Indeed, Vygotsky’s writings were removed from academic journals and libraries and survived through the efforts of family members and close colleagues who managed to conceal various manuscripts, reports, and lecture notes. Some of Vygotsky’s collaborators and students also managed to continue to pursue his ideas, albeit without directly referencing his name or associated concepts. Most notable in this regard are the efforts of Luria, his close colleague, who, among other things, is considered by many to be the founder of the field of neuropsychology. Luria’s clinical studies (e.g., Luria, 1973), including efforts to rehabilitate soldiers who had suffered brain damage as a result of injuries sustained during the Second World War, were directly informed by Vygotsky’s analysis of social and cultural mediation as the key to the formation and functioning of consciousness.
Following Stalin’s death in 1953, there was a general easing of some of the censorship that had been in place as well as an opening up of dialogue and exchange between Soviet scholars and their counterparts in the West (Kozulin, 1998). By this time, Luria had gained international recognition and another of Vygotsky’s associates, Leontiev had risen to the Chair of the Department of Psychology at Moscow University. All of this helped to foster the discovery of Vygotsky’s work by an international, multi-disciplinary audience. Pivotal were the visits to Russia by American scholars Michael Cole and James Wertsch, who worked, respectively, with Luria and Leontiev and became acquainted with aspects of SCT and with certain of Vygotsky’s writings.
An important consequence of the dialogue between the Americans and the Russians was the appearance in 1978 of Mind in Society, a select collection of Vygotsky’s writings co-edited by Cole, Silvia Scribner, Ellen Souberman, and Vera John-Steiner, also considered among the most influential English-language interpreters of Vygotsky’s works. This volume, along with Thought and Language, the first English version of which appeared in abbreviated form in 1962, remains arguably the most well-known text associated with Vygotsky. Although the 1978 volume has been criticized due to what some consider to be the relative simplification of Vygotsky’s ideas and the lack of explicit connection between the concepts presented and Vygotsky’s broader enterprise and his philosophical and social convictions, Mind in Society nonetheless succeeded, more so than the earlier version of Thought and Language, in bringing Vygotsky to the attention of international research communities. Kozulin (1998) suggests that initial reaction to Mind in Society might be characterized as a welcome reception to what was perceived as an alternative to the near hegemony of Piaget and that simultaneously appeared somewhat familiar while also introducing a rich new vocabulary for thinking about learning and development. This familiarity may be the result of the lack of contextualization of Vygotsky’s ideas in the broader context of his theory, leaving the impression of greater affinity between his thinking and that of Piaget’s, a reading that continues to persist in some circles (see Miller, 2011). While it true that both scholars engaged in empirical research with young children and were interested in the development of consciousness and the crucial role of language in thinking, their theories are marked by fundamentally different assumptions about human psychology. Our interest here is not in exploring their respective theories in detail. However, we wish to point out that examination of the range of Vygotsky’s writings that are now available (discussed below) allows one to appreciate that unlike Piaget, Vygotsky was not concerned specifically with identifying stages of development through which children must pass on their way to adulthood. Vygotsky sought instead to apprehend the dynamic relations between biological processes and social and cultural forms of mediation that give rise to human consciousness.
These issues aside, through the 1980s, references to Vygotsky became more frequent, particularly in educational research, where terms such as mediation, zone of proximal development, internalization, and private speech began to take hold alongside concepts that were not directly discussed by Vygotsky but were proposed by researchers drawing inspiration from his work. Among the notable concepts here are scaffolding (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976), apprenticeship in thinking (Rogoff, 1990), and situated learning and communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). These ideas brought interpretations of Vygotsky into a wide range of areas of teaching and learning, including the second language field, as we discuss below.
During this time, access to Vygotsky’s writings rapidly expanded, beginning with Kozulin’s (1986) detailed edition of Vygotsky’s masterwork, Thought and Language. This was soon followed by a number of other texts offering biographical details of Vygotsky’s life and the genesis of his ideas as well as overall explications of his thinking and how it developed over the course of his life (e.g., Kozulin, 1990; van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991). Through the 1990s and early 2000s, the body of Vygotsky’s published work in English grew rapidly with the six volumes of The Collected Works along with his doctoral dissertation, The Psychology of Art (1971), his textbook intended for teachers, Educational Psychology (1997a), and various other papers such as those assembled in The Essential Vygotsky (Rieber & Robinson, 2004). This work continues today with efforts to maintain an Internet archive of many of Vygotsky’s seminal writings (www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/index.htm) as well as through systematic investigation of Vygotsky’s personal archive. According to Zavershneva (2016, p. 94), cataloging the writings maintained by Vygotsky’s family allows for important corrections to publication dates of known manuscripts, which in turn permits a more accurate understanding of the development of his ideas; identification of instances in which editing of his writings by translators and publishers might have altered his intended meaning; and the existence of “notebooks, scientific diaries, and scat...
