VYGOTSKY’S SOCIOCULTURAL THEORY

Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) was a Soviet psychologist whose research work focus on the role of environment in children’s cognitive development, where it moves largely ‘from the outside in’ through understanding contextual knowledge. Learning occurs through interactions with the environment where the children have the ability to internalize new skills and information within zone of proximal development.


According to Vygotsky, infants direct contact with the environment during their first two years lead to the development of their innate perceptual, attention, and memory capacities (Vygotsky, 1978). Collaborative dialogues with more experienced members of their society enable children to learn most of the culture’s problem solving skills. Learning, he asserted, should be more like an apprenticeship instead of personal discovery.



Learning is also a culture specific process. Children learn mathematics in school has different learning experience than those who learn counting through selling things in their parents’ grocery store in Brazil.


Private Speech

Children construct cognitive structures by listening to the social speech they hear daily from others. They adopted parts of it and produce private speech – speech they say aloud to themselves.


They use self-talk strategies whenever they face cognitive challenges. For instance, when solving a jigsaw puzzle, we may get to hear, “Hmm, where’s the snowy mountain cap part? I need it now. Wait, it’s here, alright. What about the sky? It’s all blue.”


Vygotsky stressed that children engage in random thoughts and verbalise them freely. They use private speech to regulate their actions and plan their strategies. It will gradually internalize as silent speech when they become adults, where the inner voice speaks inside their head as they encounter problems (Berk and Spuhl, 1995).


Zone of Proximal Development

Zone of proximal development (ZPD) is defined as the range of distance between children’s actual developmental level as they perform tasks alone and their potential level of development as they are assisted by a more knowledgeable and competent peers and adults.



Vygotsky asserted that since learning occurs in the ZPD, their level of comprehension will increase tremendously. Analyzing the ZPD realistically enables appropriate assessment of the difficulty level of learning. In the long run, necessary accommodation can be made and thus ensuring effective individual learning.


Scaffolding

Generally, efficient learning progress can be achieved through scaffolding method. Scaffolding takes place when more accomplished adults and peers adjust the cognitive support offered to children throughout the learning process until they can handle the challenges on their own.


When children have no clue on how to proceed with a task, the adult will explain directly at the children’s listening pace and deconstruct the task into smaller manageable units. When the children begin to show progress, the adult will reduce the amount of direct assistance. The verbal exchange occurs earlier may be internalized by a child and lead to their private talk, that continues to build their confidence and competence at accomplishing the tasks fully on their own (Hedegaard, 1995).