Vygotskys Sociocultural Theory

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Vygotskys Sociocultural Theory

• Transmission of culture to new generation
• Beliefs, customs, skills
• Social interaction necessary to learn culture
• Cooperative dialogue with more knowledgeable
  members of society
• Vygotsky stressed the importance of language.
  (This is quite evident in his views concerning
  childrens private speech.)

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VYGOTSKYS SOCIOCULTURAL THEORY

• Childrens Private Speech
• Piagets View
• Piaget called childrens utterances to themselves
  egocentric speech.
• He believed that cognitive maturity and certain
  social experiencesparticularly arguments with
  agemateseventually bring an end to egocentric
  speech.

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Childrens Private Speech cont.

• Vygotskys View
• Vygotsky believed that children speak to
  themselves for self-guidance and self-direction.
• He viewed language as the foundation for all
  complex mental activities.
• As children get older and tasks become easier,
  their self-directed speech declines and is
  internalized as silent, inner speech.

• Almost all research findings reside with
  Vygotskys view. As a result, childrens speech
  to self is now called private speech instead of
  egocentric speech.
• Private speech is used more often when tasks are
  difficult, after a child makes an error, and when
  a child is confused about how to proceed. With
  age private speech goes underground, changing
  from utterances spoken out loud into whispers and
  silent lip movements.

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Social Origins of Cognition

• During early childhood, communication in the
  proximal development zone includes verbal
  dialogues as adults and more skilled peers help
  children master challenging activities.
• Effective Social Interaction
• To promote cognitive development, social
  interaction must have certain features.
• Intersubjectivity is the process whereby two
  participants who begin a task with different
  understandings arrive at a shared understanding.
• Scaffolding refers to a changing quality of
  social support over the course of a teaching
  session.
• The term guided participation is a broader
  concept than scaffolding, calling attention to
  adult and child contributions to a cooperative
  dialogue without specifying the precise features
  of communication.

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Social Origins of Cognition cont.

• Research on Social Interaction and Cognitive
  Development
• Parents who are effective scaffolders have
  children who use more private speech and are more
  successful when asked to do a similar task by
  themselves.
• Childrens planning and problem solving show more
  improvement when their partner is either an
  expert peer or an adult.
• Achieving intersubjectivity by resolving
  differences of opinion and cooperating during
  peer interaction is more important in fostering
  cognitive development than are conflict or
  disagreement.

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Vygotsky and Education

• Both Vygotskian and Piagetian classrooms have
  opportunities for active participation and
  acceptance of individual differences in cognitive
  development.
• Vygotskian environments promote assisted
  discovery.
• Assisted discovery is helped along by peer
  collaboration and the arrangement of cooperative
  learning experiences by teachers.
• According to Vygotsky, make-believe play is a
  unique zone of proximal development in which
  children try out a variety of challenging
  activities and acquire many new competencies.

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Evaluation of Vygotskys Theory

• Verbal communication may not be the only means,
  or the most important means, through which
  children learn in some cultures.
• The kind of assistance offered to children varies
  from culture to culture, depending on the tasks
  that must be mastered to become a contributing
  member of society.
• Vygotsky said little about how basic motor,
  perceptual, attention, memory, categorization,
  and problem-solving skills contribute to socially
  transmitted, complex mental activities.