Lev Vygotsky`s Social Development Theory

Lev Vygotsky`s Social Development Theory

2006

For Lev Vygotsky language is a human invention ' that is used as a means of achieving the goals of social living . And the best way to understand it , they both believe , is by adopting a genetic approach to the study of the ways in which it functions as a tool in the situations in which it is used

Vygotsky develops this insight in terms of semiotic mediation , based on an analogy with the mediating function of material tools in human activity . As Cole (1993 ) points

out , explicating Vygotsky 's ideas on this subject , all tools have a dual nature as artifacts : they are simultaneously both material and ideal , and so require of their users both physical and intellectual activity

They are ideal in that they contain in coded form the interactions of which they were previously a part and which they mediate in the present (e .g . the structure of a pencil carries within it the history of certain forms of writing . They are material in that they are embodied in material artifacts . This principle can be applied equally whether one is considering language /speech or the more usually noted forms of artifacts such as tables and knives which constitute material culture What differentiates a word , such as language ' from , say , a table , is the relative prominence of their material and ideal aspects . No word exists apart from its material instantiation (as a configuration of sound waves , or hand movements , or as writing , or as neuronal activity whereas every table embodies an imposed by thinking human beings (p . 249

Vygotsky 's interest was in the transforming effect of introducing tools into the relationship between humans and their environment and , in particular , in the effect of signs used as psychological tools to mediate mental activity : By being included in the process of behavior the psychological tool alters the entire flow and structure of mental functions . It does this by determining the structure of a new instrumental act , just as a technical tool alters the process of a natural adaptation by determining the form of labor operations (1981 br

. 137 . Vygotsky identified a variety of sign-based tools that function in this way - various systems for counting , mnemonic techniques , works of art - but the one that he undoubtedly considered to be of greatest significance - the tool of tools ' - was language . For language not only functions as a mediator of social activity , by enabling participants to plan , coordinate and review their actions through external speech in addition , as a medium in which those activities are symbolically represented , it also provides the tool that mediates the associated mental activities in the internal discourse of inner speech (Vygotsky , 1987

Vygotsky argues that there are two separate roots ' to what he calls intellectual speech (by which he may be taken to mean speech which is recognizably based on the adult language . Both a phylogenetic analysis of the behavior of anthropoids and an ontogenetic analysis of the behavior of human...