Vygotsky Applied: ZPD & Scaffolding

The Cognitive Task: Three Approaches

Using the fundamental task of language acquisition as an example, we can see a key perspective on what learning is. Oversimplifying a long debate about the nature of the cognitive task of comprehending and producing language, we can divide the basic understanding of this process into three approaches, (see below) or bodies of theory. Each of these approaches has counterparts in other domains of learning as well. Therefore the principles uncovered in the task of language acquisition are universally applicable learning precepts. As we examine the example of language acquisition, we will be looking in detail at the third of these three approaches, interactionism, and how it came to be accepted as the best explanation for both cognitive and skill acquisition, because of the insights of a key theorist, L. S. Vygotsky.

Vygotsky resources

Constructivists

Vygotsky and Social Cognition

Language Acquisition as Socialization

A number of students of linguistic development, not just those of the sociolinguistic and sociocultural groups, have emphasized the observation that language acquisition is not a purely cognitive development, but one in which socialization is embedded in the very process of acquisition. We do not learn our mother tongue in a sterile, academic setting, but in a matrix of human relationships. In a word, language acquisition is both a tool and a product of our interaction with our caregivers and peers as we grow up. It is the means by which we understand and begin to influence our physical environment, through others, and it is the means of understanding and having an influence on our social environment as well (Gass & Selinker, 1993). One important branch of this body of perspectives is sociocultural theory, and one key proponent was Vygotsky. His work has contributed to interactionist learning perspectives described below.

The implications of Vygotsky's insights are still being explored. He conducted numerous experiments with children of different ages in order to determine what type of assistance (mediation), both reified and personal, worked with different ages of children. His findings have suggested many other experiments, the evaluation of which has modified the Piagetian perspective on learning readiness, as Vygotsky found that children, with appropriate help, could achieve far more than they could by themselves, in learning tasks which measured memorization, strategy formation, and categorization. He proposed the existence of a "zone of proximal development," (ZPD) in which the learner is first helped by appropriate scaffolding (a broad term which includes mediation of physical, personal, psychological and social types), then helped less and less as the learner gains facility and confidence in the learning tasks (Lantolf & Appel, 1994). This is the same phenomena observed by those recording how caregivers assist young children in acquiring and using language correctly, by simplifying their speech when necessary, using precision in actions and pronunciation beyond their normal wont.

Types of scaffolding which have been shown to be helpful in keeping learners in their ZPD include: passive help contained in the learning materials or other resources; a reduction of intensity by having a relaxed atmosphere; less risk by providing contextual clues or other hints; less production pressure by supplying missing words when the learner can't think of them; through special assistance by a tutor or peer learners, especially in asking clarifying questions; repetition and rephrasing; close supervision by an instructor, tutor, or study partner who is somewhat more advanced or simply has skills in slightly different areas (see for example, Scovel, 2001 and Wenger, 1998).

The diagram above illustrates the essential elements of Vygotsky's theory of a Zone of Proximal Development and the place of scaffolding in that process. (c.f. Smith, 1998) Each person is seen as a learner, learning being a natural and normal process of interacting with one's environment of objects, people and processes. There are capabilities and tasks each person is able to do by oneself, and those one can only do with help from others, because of a lack of understanding or facility.

Rather than focusing on the absorption of outside expertise, the ZPD model focuses on the boundary layer between those actions and understandings which take place only with help from another or others. The outside expert may be a coach, encouraging and providing feedback to the athlete. She may be the mother of a toddler, eliciting significance from her child's utterance, which can only be partly understood by anyone else. Or the outside help may come from a group which practices its expertise as a function of doing their jobs or hobbies together. The learner can do more in their presence than possible when alone. After a time, that capacity grows, as the learner is able to do more and more. The zone moves toward greater expertise, and thus becomes thinner, but is essentially always there. Help can be given by the expert or group in a variety of ways, but key to this growth of personal understanding and capability is the desire to be part of the group of experts. The learner is able to see herself as a potential part of this group, and this provides a host of motivational mechanisms, explicit, implicit and incidental.

An essential aspect of this Vygotskyan perspective is that the learners feel that they are joining a group of practitioners who are holding them to a standard of understanding and behavior, and are assisting them in the process of fully joining the group as a potentially core participant. Expectations are often more tacit than explicit, but the social involvement underpins the learning process in a number of ways, from modeling, to encouragement, to assistance in a variety of ways (Wenger, 1998).

Sociocultural theory makes further vital observations about the social nature of learning. Being part of a group extends the perceptual potential of an individual by supplementing the limitations of a single person with the superior perceptual capacity of a group. A group which knows how to work together collaboratively will usually remember more and be able to deduce more of a shared experience than any one person in the group (Bielaczyc, 1999; Mitchell & Myles, 1998).

The process of mediation also extends the ability of the individual to recall important facts. Tools such as writing help us to move beyond the normal limits of our memory (Lantolf & Appel, 2000). Other more recent tools such as tape or digital recorders and video cameras, computers, and PDAs show promise of further increases in availability of information for recall and in allowing for selective editing. Better command of material to be learned, whether it is history or a second language, can be achieved by being able to review quickly and select the material one needs to concentrate on once again. The tools of multimedia, many of which have been utilized since the days when behaviorism was the guiding philosophy, can still be effective as tools of social learning when used in a community of learning, for example, one of the interactionist approaches.

Because the learner is not simply trying to memorize and achieve mastery through habituation, the multimedia materials can be used as challenging supplements to the level of interaction in the group setting. Alternately, the group, with the help of a more advanced guide or instructor, can help decode and deconstruct material which is too difficult for any one person to comprehend. This is another way of achieving the desirable ZPD, as scaffolding is done collectively (Donato, 1994). Because the ZPD is somewhat different for each person, often the only practical way to achieve the optimally effective zone is gradually, over time, in a group setting. Those who help others are in turn helped toward mastery by the very process of sharing their insights and judgments, as long as there is enough feedback and oversight to prevent wholesale sharing of ignorance.

A child will follow a developmental pattern in language, as well as in acquisition of other cognitive and psychomotor skills. Beginning with the period in which an adult or older peer will assist language production to a great degree, the child moves in a ZPD to a point where she begins to internalize many of the linguistic or behavioral patterns necessary. Readiness to accept assistance is conveyed by the child in numerous ways, including pauses and other types of hesitation, glances, or even requests for help in finding the correct name for an object or the correct phrasing for an essential expression. Lack of readiness to accept help can also be conveyed when the child ignores corrections, refuses to repeat a corrected phrase, by change of subject or even by displays of frustration or anger which are triggered by attempts to assist linguistically. So the pattern is from relative dependence to interdependence to growing autonomy of thought and expression. Along the way, the child's inner speech (conscious verbalization of thoughts) (de Guerrero, 1994) and private speech (subvocalization or "talking to oneself" audibly) develop as language and thought patterns are internalized. (McCafferty, 1994) This internalization process is termed "automaticity" in the context of psychomotor learning, (Romiszowski, 1999) and the development of both inner speech and private speech are important milestones along the path to automaticity. To be able to communicate automatically, without having to think of each word or phrase, to be able to spontaneously create new sentences, is actually a series of processes, because automaticity is specific to a given topic or setting. One has to develop the listening skills, the vocabulary and thought patterns, the habits, and the appropriate evaluative framework within each new communicative and social network.

In one sense, a fully developed linguistic sequence has no end, since refinements and extensions of vocabulary, comprehension, and precision of expression can carry on into and throughout adulthood. The child thus has continuous access (Vygotsky's telling phrase, cited in Lantolf & Appel, 2000) through caregivers and other adults and peers, to a body of contextualized and personalized knowledge. There is a range of knowledge and comprehension that is present in the internalized form in the individual, which then is expanded and supplemented by the depth of understanding and application which is present in the network of people sharing that knowledge.

The complementary interaction of continuous access and automaticity provide for communication (practical use of the cognitive tools), external referencing for confirmation or clarification and for further linguistic development as well. Literacy and exposure to media expand this body of knowledge further and further, beyond the bounds of those whom one can meet directly. The indirect interaction which one can experience through a book, magazine, movie or computer program can still contribute significantly to linguistic and cognitive development, throughout one's life.

The cognitive tools one uses to achieve understanding and competence in the larger society have been shaped by, and yet extended beyond, the small societal unit of caregivers and peers so crucial to early development (Lantolf & Appel, 1994). We can see that the focus on habituation of the behaviorist viewpoint, and the emphasis on spontaneous, native capacity to decipher and learn which was highlighted by innatists, has been subsumed in the more fully developed social context of the interactionists. The example of language development adduced above is simply one example among many available which demonstrate the same conceptual orientation: the interactionist model best fits how learning takes place.

Behaviorist, Innatist, Interactionist:

Three Approaches to the Cognitive Task

Behaviorism focuses on memorization and habituation. Behaviorists, led initially by B. F. Skinner, believe that language is acquired primarily as a result of cyclical and repetitive experiences of reward and punishment. A child wants various things or experiences, and is rewarded by receiving them when she points to them or otherwise indicates her desires. Then this experience of receiving the desired object is repeated when she later asks for them. As the child is praised, emotional rewards also ensue from giving correct responses or requests in the correct manner. Negative experiences, including correction of mistakes, result in the child's avoidance of those mistakes in comprehension and verbal production thereafter, provided that the negative experience is significant enough to warrant lasting attention (Brown, 2001; Mora, 2002).

Behaviorism has influenced psychology and education because of its foundation in research. Behaviorism is sometimes pejoratively called "rat psychology," since Skinner and his followers have come to their conclusions as a result of studying lab animals extensively. Skinner's final book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Skinner, 2002; originally published in 1971), expresses in the title his belief that there is no objective reality to concepts such as freedom, dignity, love, justice and so forth, since they are biochemical responses to a complex environment which have had some efficacy in helping humans to cope with that environment. So the foundation of behaviorism is severely reductionist in its philosophical roots.  However, the neurological discoveries which are assisting all of us in determining what learning is and how best to support it, have their roots in this tradition. Educational psychology owes a great and ongoing debt to the behaviorist perspective. Though it is reductionist to say so, because it is only part of the picture, we can agree that humans seek pleasure and avoid pain, and respond to reward and punishment.

Innatism is the belief that linguistic cognition (indeed, all cognition - as attempt to make sense out of the world) is a universal inborn capacity.  The innatist perspective, championed by Chomsky and his followers, holds that children, indeed, all human beings, are innately predisposed to unravel the complex code of language (Pinker, 1995). It is seen as a basic human characteristic to search for, and apply meaning to regularity, and to guess intelligently at the many ambiguities of experience. This is true of all experiences, including the experiences of spoken language. Children are manifestly able to comprehend and produce totally unique sentences, ones they have never heard or uttered before. Language acquisition is seen as emergent behavior triggered by the environment but an inevitable part of normal development (Gass & Selinker, 1993; Mora, 2002). This view has been expressed by many non-Chomskyan thinkers as well, and is sometimes labeled as a cognitive view of language or language development, since language is seen as a code to be deciphered (Kitao & Kitao, 1977). So in a larger sense, an innatist perspective would hold that humans are innately driven to "make sense" out of their experiences. The attempts to find patterns and significance in experience define the essence of learning for innatists.

Innatism has an evolutionary premise. Chomsky disciples and not a few cognitive theorists hold that all learning takes place because it is an innate characteristic of mankind which has proven to have evolutionary advantages. Man is inevitably drawn to make sense of his environment, even if the objective truth of the conjectures is unknown or distorted and the conclusions are incorrect. Over thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, this capacity to make sense of the world has proven to be advantageous and has given rise to language and culture, both key tools in learning, even in non-verbal areas (Pinker, 1997).

Interactionism holds that the key to linguistic maturation is social, not just cognitive. This emergent third theory of language development is in partial agreement with the previous two theories, understanding that both inborn capabilities and the rewards and punishments of human social environments are responsible for language development to a degree. However, interactionism holds that the key characteristic of successful language development lies in the interaction between the child and his environment, particularly his early caregivers and peers. Particular attention is given to the quality of that interaction, to often subtle ways in which care-giving adults adjust their speech for children to make it clearer in pronunciation, enunciation and more precise in meaning, when those children are at the age at which such details are helpful (Gleason, 2001; Lightbown & Spada, 1999). When mothers talk to their infants, we see little such attention to detail. And when children are older, when comprehension has already been evidenced, caregiver speech is similar to interaction with adults, though vocabulary may be simplified. But when a child is in the two- to four-year old window of careful attention to linguistic feedback, many adults consciously or unconsciously adjust their speech so that the child can more easily understand. This helps produce greater understanding, and spurs the child to further linguistic mastery. Feedback from peers begins in this time period as well, and continues throughout one's life. But this feedback is crucial for many aspects of linguistic and social development up through the teen years especially (Gleason, 2001; Vander Zanden, Crandell & Crandell, 2000).

Interactionism is valid way of describing all social learning theories. Both the perspective of the individual and the perspective of the group or groups to which individuals are a part form crucial poles for understanding the nature of knowledge and skill acquisition. Not all cognitive learning theory is of the innatist variety; some indeed see situated cognition and constructivist or constructionist theories as basically cognitive in their viewpoints, though they belong in the social learning sphere as well, since they focus on the vital social context of learning, and the observation that social forces are the strongest in shaping cognition (Lave & Wenger, 1991; McLellan, 1996).

Rather than seeing these three approaches as mutually exclusive, it is useful to see them as cumulative. Interactionism incorporates the perspectives of behaviorism and innatism in its recognition of the data these perspectives present, but it is not bounded by the same philosophical assumptions. We can see this clearly as we apply the theoretical framework  of interactionism to the process of language acquisition as a specific and typical example of learning which has informal and formal aspects.

References

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