SOCIOCULTURAL AND INTERACTIONIST APPROACHES TO SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: ARE THEY COMPATIBLE?

Abstract

Second/foreign language research within the sociocultural-theoretic (SCT) tradition has tended to proceed orthogonally to that in the more conventional interactionist paradigm. SCT researchers, although of course broadly interested in progress in the language in the same way as interactionist researchers are, in practice tend to ask different questions and to use different methods to obtain answers to them. Since the goals of educators with an SCT orientation and those with an interactionist orientation are at least similar, and the phenomena involved in people learning/acquiring/developing in a language are presumably the same whatever the theoretical terms used to describe them, this author suggests that there is a need for a unified account that allows constructs like the zone of proximal development (ZPD; Vygotsky, 1978), on the one hand, and interlanguage (Selinker, 1972), on the other, to be seen in terms of each other. This paper is intended as a small step towards constructing such an account. Beginning with diagrammatic representations of the ZPD developed by the author and a colleague (Lavin & Nakano, 2017) in an attempt to clarify the spatial nature of the ZPD, this paper will explore how the ZPD could potentially be spelled out in more concrete terms and reconciled with the concept of interlanguage. Further, leveraging the concept of imitation frequently appealed to in SCT, it will be suggested that development could be operationalised in terms of a learner’s performance in a range of linguistic output activities, and the outline of such an approach is sketched out.