Vygotsky’s Contribution to

Pedagogical Theory

James Britton
Emeritus Professor of Education, University of London

The story of Vygotsky’s influence on educational thinking in the West is

a fantastic one - it reads, as they say, like a fairy story. A young Russian
intellectual in the first instance a student of literature - a t the age of
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thirty-eight writes a book on the relation of language to thought. Having

previously worked on the ideas with colleagues for some ten years, he
finishes the manuscript off in haste, a race against tuberculosis, and dies
before it is published. Two years after its publication the book, Thought
and Language, is suppressed by the Soviet authorities and remains so for
twenty years -though not before the substance of a magnificent last
chapter, presented as a paper a t a n American conference, finds its
way - i n English - on to the pages of a psychological journal. A long
silence is finally broken when, in 1962, twenty-eight years after its
original appearance, scholars in Cambridge, Massachusetts produce an
English translation of the whole work and Bruner is on hand to write
the introduction.
But that is hardly more than the beginning of the story. Perhaps as an
effect of the ‘cold war’, recognition of the significance of Vygotsky’s
work is slow to develop: seminal works in language acquisition and
development continue to be published with slight reference, or none, to
his ideas and surprisingly enough, particularly so in America. Cam-
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bridge (Mass.), however, continued to take the lead: in 1971 M.I.T. Press
brought out an English translation of a collection of Vygotsky’s early
writings on literary texts under the title The Psychology of Art - now,
unfortunately, no longer in print. And in 1978 four American editors,
working with A. R. Luria, Vygotsky’s close colleague, disciple and friend
(and in turn his successor in Moscow), produced an edited translation of
seminal work by Vygotsky and gave i t the title Mind in Society. Finally,
 Vygotsky’s Contribution to Pedagogical Theory 23
there has this year appeared a revised and re-edited translation of
Thought and Language from M.I.T. Press.
In his introduction to the original Russian edition of Thought and
Language, Vygotsky had written, “we fully realize the inevitable
imperfections of this study, which is no more than a first step in a new
direction.” In which direction? Vygotsky has this answer: “Our findings
point the way to a new theory of consciousness”-and he goes on to
indicate four aspects of the work that are novel, and - consequently “in
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need of further careful checking.” I have the sense here of someone

embarking on an idea he knows he cannot himself carry through to a
conclusion. His four discoveries, to state them as briefly as I can, are
these:
(1) Word meanings evolve during childhood: it cannot be assumed that
when a child uses a word he means by it what we as adult speakers
would mean.
(2) While accepting Piaget’s theory of the growth of spontaneous
concepts - ideas arrived a t by inference from (or evidenced by) our own
experiences, Vygotsky adds the notion of non-spontaneous concepts -

ideas taken over from other people (notably teachers) - taken over as
problems needing solution, or as ‘empty categories’, so to speak, which
need time to find embodiment in our own experience and ground them-
selves in our own knowledge base. Vygotsky sees this as a two-way
movement, ‘upward’ of spontaneous concepts, ‘downward’ of non-
spontaneous concepts, each mode facilitating the other - and the joint
operation being characteristic of human learning.
(3) Vygotsky believed that mastery of the written language learning
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to read-and-write - had a profound effect upon the achievement of

abstract thinking. The constancy of the written language, grafted, so to
speak, upon the immediacy of the spoken language, enables a speaker to
reflect upon meanings and by doing so acquire a new level of control, a
critical awareness of his/her own thought processes.
(4) Speech in infancy, Vygotsky claimed, is the direct antecedent of
thinking a t a later stage. When children discover that it is helpful to
speak aloud about what they are doing, they begin to employ what
Vygotsky termed ‘speech for oneself; and thereafter speech takes on a
dual function and, in due course, develops differentially; conversation
becomes more effective as communication, while monologue or ‘running
commentary’ (speech for oneself) changes in what is virtually the
opposite direction. That is to say, in conversation children extend their
control of the grammatical structures of the spoken language and
increase their resources of conventional word-meanings. In their
monologues, on the contrary, they exploit the fact that they are talking
to themselves by using as it were ‘note form’ - skeletal or abbreviated
structures that would mean little to one who did not already share the
speaker’s thoughts and personal, idiosyncratic word meanings pet
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words, inventions, portmanteau terms, rich in meaning for the originator

but minimally endorsed by convention.
Vygotsky observed these changes in the speech of children from about
three years old to about seven - changes that set up a marked difference
between their conversational mode and their use of ‘speech for oneself.
On the strength of these observations he speculated that, rather than
‘withering away’ as Piaget had suggested, speech for oneself became
24 English in Education
internalized and continued to operate as the genesis of thought, perhaps
moving through the stages of inner speech to verbal thinking and thence
to the most elusive stage of all - thought itself.
By this account, then, we think by handling ‘post-language sym-
bols’ forms that began as speech but which have been successively
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freed from the constraints of the grammar of the spoken language and
from the constraints of conventional, public word meanings. It is this
freedom that characterises the fluidity of thought - and accounts for the
necessity of imposing organisation upon our thoughts when we want to
communicate them.
It was a brilliant insight on Vygotsky’s part to realize that when
speech for oneself becomes internalized it is in large part because the
child, in handling the freer forms of speech that constitute that mode,
begins to be capable of carrying out mental operations more subtle than
anything he or she can put into words. I think we can become adare of
the reciprocal process when as we listen to discussion we engender some
response a question to be asked or a comment we want to make - and
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have a clear sense that the process of moving from the fluid operation of
thought units to the utterance of rule-governed ‘public’ speech using
conventional word meanings is one that may demand strenuous mental
effort on our part.
When Mind i n Society appeared in 1978, a review by Stephen Toulmin
in the New York Review of Books underlined Vygotsky’s concern with
consciousness. He saw Vygotsky as denying on the one hand that human
consciousness can be regarded as simply an effect of the genes, of nature,
or on the other hand as an effect of environment - of nurture - claiming
that both influences must interact in the creation of mind in the
individual, He gave his review the title, The Mozart of Psychology
(nominating Luria in consequence as The Beethoven) and suggested that
Western psychology urgently needed to take on the broader perspective
that Vygotsky had initiated.
It is in this work that Vygotsky’s central contention becomes
clear - the claim that human consciousness is achieved by the internali-
sation of shared social behaviour. A series of ‘temporary connections’ is
made by the individual within the individual life-span; each link makes
possible further links, each operation begins with external observable
social behaviour - an exposed segment, as it were, of what is to become
inner behaviour. Thus is indicated, surely, a new emphasis upon the
observation and study of childhood activities for the light they throw
upon later behaviours not open to observation.
But social behaviour implies interaction within a group whose
activities have been shaped to cultural patterns. The relationship
between individual development and the evolution of society is a
complex one, not a matter of mere recapitulation or parallelism. The
familiar story of the psychologist Kellogg and hi:: chimpanzee comes to
mind: the chimpanzee had acted as companion t(: Kellogg’s infant son
and for a period of years both creatures developed, so to speak, in
tandem - able to share each other’s activities - but only up to the point
where the boy learned to speak: the young Kellogg is today, I believe,
himself a scientist the chimpanzee remains a chimpanzee! In the
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historical development from animal to man, the acquisition of language

is a watershed: in the development of the individual child from birth to
 Vygotsky’s Contribution to Pedagogical Theory 25
three or four years, the acquisition of language is a watershed.
Speech, that begins as a shared social activity on the part of the child
and becomes a principal means of the mental regulation and refinement
of his individual behaviour this is the prime example of Vygotsky’s
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theory of internalisation to achieve consciousness. He gives us a further

striking example when he claims that make-believe play in early
childhood constitutes the earliest, and a t that time only available form
of imagination. It is nearer the truth, he says, to claim that imagination
in adolescence and later is ‘make-believe play without action’ than it is
to claim that make-believe play in young children is ‘imagination in
action’.
The implications of these ideas for pedagogy are, of course, enormous.
If speech in childhood lays the foundations for a life-time of thinking,
how can we continue to prize a silent classroom? And if shared social
behaviour (of many kinds, verbal and non-verbal) is seen as the source of
learning, we must revise the traditional view of the teacher’s role. The
teacher can no longer act as the ‘middle-man’ in all learning-as it
becomes clear that education is a n effect of community. Bruner, in a
recent book, devoted a chapter to Vygotsky’s ideas, and in a later
chapter makes this comment: “Some years ago I wrote some very
insistent articles about the importance of discovery learning.. .What I
am proposing here is an extension of that idea, or better, a completion.
My model of the child in those days was very much in the tradition of the
solo child mastering the world by representing it to himself in his own
terms. In the intervening years I have come increasingly to recognize
that most learning in most settings is a communal activity, a sharing of
the culture. It is not just that the child must make his knowledge his
own, but that he must make it his own in a community of those who
share his sense of belonging to a culture. It is this that leads me to
emphasize not only discovery and invention but the importance of
negotiating and sharing-in a word, of joint culture creating as an
object of schooling and as an appropriate step en route to becoming a
member of the adult society in which one lives out one’s life.” (Bruner,
1986, p. 127).
The notion that shared social behaviour is the beginning stage of
learning throws responsibility upon those who interact socially with the
growing child. By interacting in such a way that their awareness of
approaches to skilled behaviour, their awareness of snags and obstacles
to such behaviour are made available to learners, they are in fact (in
Vygotsky’s terms) lending consciousness to those learners and enabling
them to perform in this relationship tasks they could not achieve if left
to themselves. Again in Vygotsky’s terms, this is to open up for the
learner ‘the zone of proximal development’ - an area of ability for which
one’s previous achievements have prepared one, but which awaits
assisted performance for its realization. That assistance may take the
form of teacherlstudent interaction, or peer tutoring, or group
activity as well, of course, as in the give and take of social cooperation
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in and out of school.

Viewed thus broadly, we might add that a learner by taking part in
rule-governed social behaviour may pick up the rules by means hardly
distinguishable from the processes by which they were first socially
derived-and by which they continue to be amended. On the other
26 English in Education
hand-along may come the traditional teacher and-with the best
intentions, trying to be helpful - set out to observe the behaviour,
analyse to codify the rules and teach the outcome as a recipe. Yes, this
may sometimes be helpful, but as consistent pedagogy it is manifestly
counter-productive.
Taking ‘community’ in a micro sense, it is likely that we all live in a
number of communities. As teachers we are responsible for one of
those - the classroom. It is clear we have a choice: we can operate so as
to make that as rich an interactive learning community as we can, or we
may continue to treat it as a captive audience for whatever instruction
we choose to offer.
Wherever Vygotsky’s voice can be heard, perhaps that choice
constitutes a Zone of Proximal Development for many of us.

References

Bruner, Jerome. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Harvard Univ.

Press
Kellogg W N & Louise A. (1933) The Ape and the Child, McGraw Hill
Piaget, Jean. (1926) Language and Thought of the Child, Routledge &
Kegan Paul
Toulmin, Stephen. (1978) ‘The Mozart of Psychology’, New York Review
of Books Vol. XXV (14), Sept 28
Vygotsky, Lev. (1939) ‘Thought and Speech’, Psychiatry Vol. 2, pp.
29-57
Vygotsky, Lev. (1962) Thought and Language, M.I.T. Press
Vygotsky, Lev. (1971) The Psychology of Art, M.I.T. Press
Vygotsky, Lev. (1978) Mind in Society, Harvard University Press
Vygotsky, Lev. (1987) Thought and Language, newly revised and
edited, M.I.T. Press