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Lev Vygotsky

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 Encyclopedia of Language
Development
Vygotsky, Lev

Contributors: Jeremy E. Sawyer & Anna Stetsenko

Edited by: Patricia J. Brooks & Vera Kempe
Book Title: Encyclopedia of Language Development
Chapter Title: "Vygotsky, Lev"
Pub. Date: 2014
Access Date: March 11, 2016
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks
Print ISBN: 9781452258768
Online ISBN: 9781483346441
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483346441.n211
Print pages: 664-666
©2014 SAGE Publications, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the
pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
SAGE SAGE Reference
Copyright © 2014 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) developed a cultural-historical (aka sociocultural) theory of

human development and learning in postrevolutionary Russia on the foundation of
Marxist dialectical philosophy and its sociopolitical ethos. Although original works date
back to the 1920s and 1930s, this theory went through exponential growth first in
Vygotsky's own research school in the Soviet Union (works by A. N. Leontiev, A. R.
Luria, and others that extended through the 1980s) and later internationally. Its unique
vision of human development, mind, language, and learning has radical, and quite
contemporary, implications that resonate with recently influential situated, collaborative,
embodied, and distributed cognition theories, dynamic systems theory, and others.
Vygotsky's ideas about cultural mediation and the relationship between thinking and
speech directly impacted many influential theories such as those by Jerome Bruner,
Michael Cole, Barbara Rogoff, Katherine Nelson, Michael Tomasello, Vera John-
Steiner, Donald Merlyn, James Lantolf, and James Wertsch, among others. Vygotsky's
views have been continuously reassessed and will likely undergo still newer
interpretations given that major works became available to international readership only
recently, explorations in his archives are continuing, and many difficulties are involved in
translation. Vygotsky's ideas often require extended interpretation involving drawing
connections across scattered works because he himself never had a chance to
retrospectively comment on the cumulative meaning and overall import of his theory,
given the extreme circumstances of his swift and rather brief career spanning an
extraordinarily tumultuous historical-political era.

Language and Speech within a Dialectical Theory of Human Development

Vygotsky's views on language are embedded within his broader dialectical theory of
human development and can be interpreted in its light. The overall approach he took
was to understand mind and language not as separate faculties of isolated individuals
acting in a vacuum but instead as developing out of human engagements in the world,
saturated with culture and social interactions, to serve the purposes of participating in
communal life. The underlying rationale was to dialectically bridge the traditional
divides—especially between material versus mental activities and between collective
versus individual processes—by revealing their developmental continuity and common
grounding in social, collaborative activities (i.e., human culture) while focusing on the
uniqueness of the human mind and cognition. It is in explaining what is unique about the
human mind and consciousness that the topic of language and speech becomes
central.

For Vygotsky, the development of consciousness and language is based in the

development of humans' practical, collaborative relations that form the foundation of
human culture. Following Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Vygotsky wrote that the
essential characteristic of human individuals is their ability to engage in productive,
social labor—practical, collaborative activity that sustains and drives social life by
changing material conditions of existence with the help of ever more sophisticated
tools. In the course of developing these productive, practical activities, humans enter
into complex forms of social interactions, creating and employing new material and
psychological tools. For Vygotsky, early humans developed gesture and later speech to
help organize, regulate, and coordinate the labor process and associated social
interactions among people. Thus, social speech originated historically as an instrument
of practical activities and the social relations they spawned. As human labor activity and
social interactions grew more complex, numeric and written language systems

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SAGE SAGE Reference
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developed to sustain and further these activities.

Speech, a new part of collaborative practical activity, helped to modify, regulate, and
direct that activity. In much the same way that physical tools and instruments mediated
objective human activity, the gestures and vocalizations that accompanied social labor
also came to mediate this ongoing activity, as well as the relations among its
participants. While physical instruments produced changes in objects in the external
environment, the use of speech and signs produced changes in the behavior of others
and oneself. This systematic and widespread use of physical and psychological
instruments in a social labor process, gradually expanding in history, was the objective
force that gave rise to human consciousness.

Developmental Dynamics of Language and Speech

For Vygotsky, the use of signs and language to communicate with others in the course
of practical activities in the form of interpsychological processes gradually engenders
intrapsychological processes. As Vygotsky put it, a sign is always originally a means
used for social purposes, a means of influencing others, and only later becomes a
means of influencing oneself. While some tools aimed directly at transforming the
physical world, psychological tools like language quintessentially aimed at transforming
social and psychological processes (and ultimately material reality as well).

Vygotsky took the increasingly complex social relations generated by labor and its
instruments to be the foundation of human consciousness. Vygotsky summed his
position by paraphrasing Marx's sixth thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach: “The psychological
nature of man is an aggregate of social relations transferred within and becoming
functions of the personality, the dynamic parts of its structure.” Signs, language, and
speech appear first in shared, external form and are then internalized by individuals.
For Vygotsky, the internalization process is formative of psychological processes in
both human cultural history and the ontogenic development of each individual. These
ideas were summed up in what Vygotsky termed the general law of development of
higher mental functions, according to which “these functions arise as forms of
cooperative activity. Only later are they transformed by the child into the sphere of his
own mental activity.”

From Vygotsky's perspective, a child develops psychologically through engagement in

practical, social activity with others, beginning with the simplest forms of adult-child
interaction, which involve cultural tools that embody the social experience of humanity.
Shared routine activities with an adult, including culturally patterned activities such as
pointing and naming an object (e.g., ball) cause profound modifications in children's
perception and attention, orienting them toward an object that had not gained attention
in its own right. As the meaning of words comes to be understood, naming the object
indicates its essential functions and characteristics within a given culture and places it
within a category of similar objects (e.g., the ball is a toy). Thus, the word imparts a
broader (generalized) understanding of the ball than could be gained merely through
reliance on its superficial appearance and spontaneous actions performed with it.
Language continuously undergoes its own cultural development as human practical
activity and forms of social collaborative interactions develop. As a result, each new
generation, through the acquisition of language and other cultural tools, also acquires
(and can further expand upon) the accumulated experiences and practical
consciousness developed in the course of human history. As Vygotsky wrote, each

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instance of sign-using behavior by the child originated as a form of social collaboration,
which is why this semiotic behavior, even at the more advanced stages of development,
remains a social mode of functioning.

The Role of Language and Speech in the Development of the Mind

Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory of mind asserts that the internalization of language,

the primary system of culturally developed signs, plays a key role in the development of
the uniquely human higher mental functions and consciousness in general. Children first
display rudimentary, lower mental functions such as spontaneous forms of attention and
memory. The use of signs and language in practical social activity with others brings
about new connections between these functions, restructuring and transforming them
into more complex, qualitatively different higher psychological functions. These culturally
mediated, coordinated, and consciously employed functions include intentional
memory, purposeful attention, and verbal thought. For Vygotsky, this interfunctional
system has the irreducible, systemic qualities of human consciousness.

Vygotsky proposed that thinking and speech, though highly integrated in their mature
forms, have different origins and trajectories of development. Prelinguistic or nonverbal
thought develops from infants' active sensory-motor problem-solving activity. For
Vygotsky, while there is a prelinguistic phase in the development of thought and a pre-
intellectual phase in the development of speech (e.g., babbling), nonverbal thinking and
speech merge in social activity during the second or third year of life. As the child
develops meaningful words, thinking and speech merge together, whereby thought
becomes verbal and speech becomes rational. This new tool of verbal thinking
ultimately leads to development of abstract, theoretical thought and conceptual
reasoning, which are powerful tools for understanding and transforming the world.

Vygotsky saw language as the most important psychological tool developed in human
history, not only because it reorganizes the mind, engendering verbal thinking and
creating new systemic qualities, but because it also leads to the central characteristic
of the human personality: self-regulated and goal-directed voluntary activity (also
termed will). Vygotsky outlined the internalization of language and the development of
volition as proceeding through three main ontogenetic stages: social speech,
egocentric speech, and inner speech. As a child develops social speech, he or she
comes to use words with increasing effectiveness, without necessarily at first
understanding their semantic denotation. Words initially merely aid in shared activity
(labeling, requesting adult help, etc.), with language entirely directed toward others.
Egocentric speech is a transitional phase in which social speech becomes self-
directed, organizing and directing one's own activity in the same ways that adults
previously directed the child. Instead of appealing to adults for help, the child essentially
appeals to him- or herself. Gradually, what the child has been capable of doing together
with others can now be done by the child independently; functions shared between
people become functional systems that can be actively applied by the child in his or her
own activities and practical pursuits. Vygotsky observed that children transition from
solving practical tasks with their hands and eyes to solving them with the help of their
speech. During the age interval of roughly 3 to 7 years, egocentric speech changes in
form, becoming further differentiated from social speech until it becomes silent, inner
speech, which precedes and regulates activity and is used for thinking and planning
intentional action.

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For Vygotsky, this development of the mature use of cultural signs, especially language,
is significant in a multitude of areas. First, it frees the child from the immediate concrete
situation and the need for a direct, spontaneous, and predetermined response to the
environment. Instead, it becomes possible to set goals and explore potential strategies
of acting on the verbal plane before carrying out physical actions. It becomes possible
for the child to imagine and discuss objects and events that are not immediately
present and to operate within hypothetical situations. The past and future open up,
allowing the child to operate in a greatly expanded framework of space and time.
Verbal thought and inner speech provide the basis for self-awareness and reflection on
one's own actions, thoughts, and emotions, which are essential in the construction of
self and identity.

Conclusion

In sum, Vygotsky's seminal contributions to language development epitomize a shift

away from viewing language as an abstract system of signs and speech as an
individual and isolated mental process to understanding them as powerful tools that
originate in social, collaborative practices and undergo dynamic developments both in
cultural history and in ontogeny. Language and speech can be explained by looking into
their genesis and role in organizing complex, specifically human collaborative activities,
social interactions, and the dynamic interplay across dimensions of human
consciousness.

• speech (language)
• language development
• egocentrism
• theories of human development
• social activities
• human development
• shared activities

Jeremy E. Sawyer
Anna Stetsenko The Graduate Center, City University of New York
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483346441.n211
See Also:

• Bruner, Jerome
• Cultural Learning
• Interrelationship of Language and Cognitive Development (Overview)
• Joint Attention in Language Development
• Literacy Effects on Cognitive Development
• Parental Responsiveness and Scaffolding of Language Development
• Private Speech/Inner Speech
• Social Foundations of Communicative Development

Further Readings
John-Steiner, V., C. P. Panofsky, and L. W. Smith, eds. Sociocultural Approaches to
Language and Literacy: An Interactionist Perspective. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1994. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511897047
Lantolf, J. and S. Thorne. Sociocultural Approach to Second Language Learning. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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Stetsenko, A. and I. M. Arievitch. “Cultural-Historical Activity Theory: Foundational
Worldview and Major Principles.” In The Sociocultural Turn in Psychology: The
Contextual Emergence of Mind and Self, J. Martin and S. Kirschner, eds. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010.
Vygotsky, L. S. “Dynamics and Structure of the Adolescent's Personality.” In Collected
Works of L. S. Vygotsky (Vol. 5), R. W. Rieber, ed. New York: Kluwer/Plenum, 1930-
1931/1998.
Vygotsky, L. S. “The History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions.” In
Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky (Vol. 4), R. W. Rieber, ed. New York: Plenum,
1960/1997.
Vygotsky, L. S. “Thinking and Speech.” In Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky. Vol. 1, R.
W. Rieber and A. Carton, eds. New York: Plenum, 1934/1987.
Vygotsky, L. S. “Tool and Sign in the Development of the Child.” In Collected Works of
L. S. Vygotsky. Vol. 6, R. W. Rieber, ed. New York: Kluwer/Plenum, 1984/1999.

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