Received: 10 March 2020

DOI: 10.1111/jtsb.12260

ORIGINAL ARTICLE
- -Revised: 18 August 2020 Accepted: 14 September 2020

Scaffolding and the zone of proximal

development: A problematic relationship

Jiao Xi1 | James P. Lantolf1,2

1
School of Foreign Studies, Xi'an Jiaotong
University, Xi'an, China ABSTRACT
2
Professor Emeritus, Pennsylvania State For nearly four decades, a variety of social science
University, University Park, disciplines have assumed that the zone of proximal
Pennsylvania, USA
development (ZPD) and the metaphor of scaffolding
Correspondence reflect more or less the same process. However, we will
James P. Lantolf, School of Foreign argue that any similarity is at best partial and at worst
Studies, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an,
China. superficial. Equating the processes adds nothing to
Email: jplantolf@gmail.com Vygotsky's general theory and in fact may weaken and
dilute the robustness of the theory. To make the non‐
equivalence case, the paper first presents an overview
of Vygotsky's approach to psychology that includes an
expansive discussion of the ZPD not only as the activity
in which instruction leads development, but also as the
key to his approach to experimental research. This is
followed by a critical review of the relevant statements
that have appeared in the literature on the nature of
scaffolding, its presumed link to the ZPD and that
brings to the fore the inadequacies of the metaphor
itself that disqualify it as an equivalent process. While
the ZPD can be understood to include the kind of
interaction that is described in the scaffolding litera-
ture, it is a much broader and far more robust process
than scaffolding, as is made apparent when the two
processes are compared, which is the focus of the
concluding section of the article. In the comparison we
summarize the analyses presented, especially with re-
gard to the implications and relevance of the metaphors
underlying each concept.

J Theory Soc Behav. 2020;1–24. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jtsb © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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KEYWORDS
education, human consciousness, individual development,
research methodology, scaffolding, social situation of
development, zone of proximal development

1 | INTRODUCTION

Nearly four decades ago, Cazden (1979/1983) suggested that the communicative interaction
that occurs between adults, usually parents and/or teachers, and their children and/or stu-
dents, captured in the metaphor of scaffolding proposed by Wood, Bruner, and Ross (1976)
resembles the process envisioned by Vygotsky's (1978, 1987) zone of proximal development
(henceforth, ZPD). Since that time researchers in an array of disciplines have assumed that
scaffolding and the ZPD reflect more or less the same process. These disciplines include literacy
studies (e.g. Applebee & Langer, 1983, developmental psychology (e.g., Carr & Pike, 2012; Pratt,
Kerig, Cowan, & Cowan, 1988), family studies (e.g., Neitzel & Stright, 2003), and educational
psychology (Bourbour, Högberg, & Lindqvist, 2020). Indeed, our own field of applied linguistics
has frequently equated the concepts (e.g., Tajeddin & Kamali, 2020; Walqui & van Lier, 2010).
In the interest of full disclosure, we must also point out that an early publication by the second
author of the present study (Aljaafreh & Lantolf, 1994) also assumed the processes to be
equivalent.
The argument to be developed in this article is that the concepts are not synonymous and
equating them substantially undermines the significance and scope of the ZPD within Vygot-
sky's general theory of psychology. Moreover, as we will argue, the ZPD serves a dual function
in Vygotsky's approach to psychology: as a theoretical concept through which higher mental
functioning develops from the social environment, and as the foundation of his research
methodology rooted in Marx's historical dialectic.
The discussion that follows is organized around five topics: an overview of Vygotsky's
approach to psychology and how he envisioned a way out of the crisis that plagued the
discipline during his time and in many ways continues to plague psychology today; the ZPD
and its place in Vygotsky's general theory and in particular, education; the connection be-
tween Vygotsky's research methodology and the ZPD; a critical historical analysis of what we
see as representative statements on scaffolding, including those that link it to the ZPD; a
comparison of scaffolding and the ZPD, which reveals that the former concept is limited to
face‐to‐face interaction, fails to take full account of context, and features task fluency and
independent performance as its goal, while the latter encompasses face‐to‐face interaction but
also extends to domains such as play and even interaction with texts, is clearly focused on
development over task fluency, and sees context as a crucial factor in shaping development.
Above all, as we will detail in the conclusion, the two concepts are predicated and very
different metaphors. Scaffolding is derived from an architectural metaphor in which literal
scaffolds support the workers as they construct a predetermined edifice. The ZPD, on the
other hand, is grounded in an agricultural metaphor in which the buds and flowers of fruit‐
bearing trees mature as they are tended by growers. The quality of the fruit that eventually
emerges depends on the nature and quality of the care they receive at critical points in the
maturation process—an event that is difficult, if not impossible, to capture through the
scaffolding metaphor.
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2 | TOWARD A UNIFIED THEORY OF PSYCHOLOGY

We begin our discussion by explaining why the first word in the title of this section is “toward.”
At the time of his early death in 1934 at the age of 38, Vygotsky had yet to achieve his goal of
formulating a unified theory of psychology. As documented throughout his writings, he
continued to struggle with, revise, and even abandon components of what he believed an in-
tegrated theory of psychology required. For this reason reading Vygotsky is no easy task. The
overall body of work he produced, and it was substantial for such a brief life, was a work in
progress. Therefore, one must try to read Vygotsky with the same developmental eye that he
proposed as the only valid methodology to understand and explain the formation and func-
tioning of higher mental functions unique to humans.
In The historical meaning of the crisis in psychology (Vygotsky, 1997d), Vygotsky began to
lay a foundation for a unified theory of the discipline. In this work, which one might consider
as a prolegomena to a theory of psychology, Vygotsky grappled with the mind/body dualism
inherited by psychology from philosophy and which in his view prevented psychology from
formulating a viable theory of human consciousness. He eschewed the various ad hoc pro-
posals offered by his contemporaries to bridge the idealist‐materialist gap and argued that
neither the idealist nor the materialist branch alone was capable of fully understanding the
unique nature of human consciousness that distinguishes us from all other higher forms of
animals (Arievitch, 2017). Vygotsky's proposal was to build a materialist psychology grounded
in dialectical principles in much the same way that Marx had appropriated these principles to
build his theory of political economy, “we must reconsider the foundations and principles of
psychology in light of dialectical materialism” (Vygotsky, 1997a, p. 51). Especially important
for Vygotsky was his appreciation of Marx's research methodology, as we explain in due
course.
The idealist branch of psychology represented in the work of Freud, Jung, Husserl, Dilthy,
among others, and influenced primarily by Kant's philosophy, was interested in the study of
consciousness (and the subconscious mind as well), an orientation that Vygotsky was sympa-
thetic to, but through theoretical assumptions and research methods, including introspection,
psychoanalysis, and hermeneutics, that he rejected as lacking scientific rigor. The materialist
branch, represented by Pavlov's reflexology in the USSR and Watson's behaviorism in the
Anglo‐American domain, adhered to empiricist principles established by Locke, Berkeley, and
Hume. Vygotsky acknowledged that materialist psychology instantiated a rigorous research
methodology borrowed from the natural sciences; however, because of this, he believed its
scope was limited to the study of low‐level biologically determined reactions to environmental
stimuli.
Vygotsky proposed to overcome the schism in psychology by formulating a new approach to
the study of higher mental functioning—an approach informed by materialist dialectics and in
particular by Marx's use of history as a research methodology. In The crisis in psychology
Vygotsky proposed that the overall methodological orientation of psychology “must reveal the
essence of the given area of phenomena, the laws of their change, their qualitative and quan-
titative characteristics, their causality, we must create categories and concepts appropriate to it,
in short, we must create our own Das Kapital” (1997a, p. 330). Fundamental to this project was
Marx's principle of the “reverse method” (Vygotsky, 1997a, p. 235), which Ollman (2003, p. 116)
characterizes as the study of “history backwards.” Vygotsky (1997a, p. 235) describes Marx's
approach to research in the following way:
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A certain state of development and the process itself can only be fully understood
when we know the endpoint of the process, the result, the direction it took, and the
form into which the given process developed … having arrived at the end of the path
we can more easily understand the whole path in its entirety as well as the meaning
of its different stages.

In this regard Vygotsky alludes to Marx's famous statement that “human anatomy contains
a key to the anatomy of the ape” (Marx, 1973/1939, p. 105), which for Vygotsky raised serious
questions about the research method utilized by Pavlov—a method that replicated “the route
taken by nature” (Vygotsky, 1997a, p. 235) and which considered animals as the key to un-
derstanding human behavior.
Echoing Marx's analytical method directed at understanding the political economy of in-
dustrial capitalism, Vygotsky proposed a research method for the study of higher psychology
functions also grounded in history. He argued that for psychology to explain fully formed
mental processes as they have been fossilized and automatized in the unified system that is
adult consciousness a historically‐based methodology was necessary (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 62).
Otherwise it would be difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle the respective contributions of
biology and culture to mental functioning. He proposed, again following Marx, that an analysis
should begin with a description of the external, or phenotypic, appearance of a process and then
proceed to a deeper analysis that uncovers its essence, or genotypic origin (Vygotsky, 1978, p.
62). He cautioned that this analytic distinction is necessary because two phenotypically similar
processes may arise from two distinct genotypic “causal‐dynamic” origins; likewise, two similar
genotypic processes may manifest two completely different phenotypic appearances (Vygotsky,
1978, p. 62).
In an interview, Vasily Davydov, whose work in educational psychology was influenced by
Vygotsky, challenged the view that the methods used in the natural sciences, including
controlled experimentation, could be used to explain “the essence of the animal and the human
psyche” (Levitin, 1980, p. 264), given that these methods are unable to take account of “the basic
mechanism of the psyche—goal orientation … because their own objects of study do not involve
setting goals” (p. 265). Davydov argues that to import the methodological orientation of the
natural sciences into psychology, creates “the illusion that the problems of psychology, too, can
be tackled in terms, say, of biochemistry and physiology” … resulting in explanations of psy-
chological functions as “mechanisms of chemical reactions or electrical processes taking place
in the brain” rather than as the result of goal directed meaningful actions formed and imple-
mented by human agents (p. 266).
Humans share features with other animals, in particular, higher primates, in terms of in-
stincts that enable organisms to respond appropriately to predictable environmental occur-
rences (e.g., reflexive reaction to a sudden noise or burst of light, urge to flee from danger, etc.)
along with such needs as maintaining our physical bodies through intake of nutrition and
maintenance of the species through reproduction. However, according to Vygotsky (1998,
p. 228), human instincts differ from animal instincts in that they are incomplete and lacking in
the mechanisms of behavior that animals manifest and while they serve as “prerequisites and
points of departure for further development,” they are much less significant in the life of human
neonates than they are in newborn animals. As a result, human infants virtually from the
beginning of their life, live through others (i.e., mediation).
One of the criticisms that some have been leveled against Vygotsky, (see for example
Arievitch, 2017) is that he fails to recognize that human infants are mediated by others before
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they to develop the capacity for symbolic communication that begins to emerge between the
first and second year of life. However, sifting carefully through Vygotsky's discussion of what
transpires in the time span from birth to the end of the first year of life, one encounters several
passages where it seems clear that he indeed acknowledged that infants' relations, physical as
well as psychological, to the world are in fact mediated by adults. Following are some examples
of Vygotsky's commentary on this important point, all of which are taken from the chapter on
“Infancy” in Vygotsky (1998):

1. From the very beginning, the infant is confronted only by situations in which his whole
behavior is intertwined and interwoven into sociability. His path to things and to the
satisfaction of his own needs is always channeled through relations with another person.
(p. 230)
2. Almost all personal activity of the infant pours into the stream of his social relations. His
relation to the external world is always a relation through another person. (p. 230)
3. The mentality of the infant from the first moment of his life is locked into common life with
other people. (p. 235)

As a consequence of the various forms of social mediation that humans experience in the
variety of social contexts in which they find themselves from birth through adolescence and into
adult life, they develop an extremely powerful capacity, unavailable to animals, to intentionally
and voluntarily deal with the unpredicted events and objects encountered in the environment.
This capacity is the higher functional system, or consciousness, that emerges from culturally
organized activity that operates on the material world and reshapes it to meet not only our
biological needs (e.g., nutrition, shelter, etc.) but, depending on the type of socioeconomic
conditions one lives in (e.g., industrial, consumer, or surveillance capitalism, or socialism), our
social needs (e.g., education, transportation, ostentation, etc.) as well. In The German Ideology
Marx and Engels write the following with regard to practical activity and consciousness, an
orientation to human nature and consciousness that Vygotsky sought to integrate into a unified
theory of psychology:

The production of ideas, of conceptions, or consciousness, is at first directly inter-

woven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language
of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage
as the direct efflux of their material behavior. The same applies to mental production
as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of
a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc.—real, active men,
as they are conditioned by definite development of their productive forces and of the
intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can
never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their
actual life‐process … men, developing their material production and their material
intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the prod-
ucts of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by
life. (Marx & Engles, 1978, pp. 154–155)

Consciousness endows humans with an awareness of reality, which, for Marx and Vygotsky,
is humanized nature created by collective sociocultural activity. As children mature and are
brought into their cultures, their cultures are also brought into them as they appropriate the
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semiotic legacy of their predecessors. The primary mechanism through which cultural mean-
ings are made available is language, or better expressed in Vygotsky's terminology, speaking
(which also includes writing in literate cultures). While young children, owing to their bio-
logical inheritance, are able to perceive shapes, dimensions, colors, odors, etc. emanating from
objects in the world, they are unable to analyse, synthesize and ultimately comprehend the
images and impressions in the same way as adults until language emerges and they are able to
perceive reality and ultimately think about it, through word meaning (Vygotsky, 1998, p. 88). As
Vygotsky cogently puts it, when someone, such as a child, does not have the words to organize
and make sense of what one sees, “I see a number of objects that fill my room, identifying that
which I perceive with that which I actually see is a simple illusion. I can see dimensions, form,
color of these objects, but I cannot see that this is a cabinet, this is a table, this is a person”
(Vygotsky, 1998, p. 88).
Analogizing from Marx's observation that we create and use concrete tools to manipulate
and control physical nature, Vygotsky proposed that humans also use symbolic tools, primarily
language, to organize and regulate their mental functioning. More specifically, as children
participate in the socially organized activities of their communities, symbolically mediated by
parents, siblings, teachers, playmates, etc., their consciousness develops. The outcome of this
developmental process is a unified functional system comprised of perception, attention,
memory, imagination, emotion amenable to self‐mediation, or regulation, through similar
symbolic means that they experience in interactions with others. This new system Vygotsky
referred to as conscious awareness, which not only imbues humans with awareness of their
reality but also with the ability to intentionally control their own thinking and behavior in the
face of this reality in order to achieve specific goals and fulfill specific needs. The advantage of
higher mental functioning is that it enables humans to plan, or carry out mentally through use
of symbols, behavior that they may ultimately decide to instantiate concretely. Clearly, this
capacity imbues humans with a distinct advantage in that we are able to vicariously engage in
an activity on the mental plane before actualizing it in reality (Arievitch, 2017). Vygotsky
(1997a, p. 68) refers to this unique ability of humans as “doubled experience”, an active form of
adaptation missing from animal life.
Through symbolic meanings we also modify our internal biological nature in culturally
appropriate ways. Holodynski (2013), for example, observes that in many western cultures,
biological instincts such as distress and pleasure expand into a broader array of cultural
emotions as they become semanticized in language. Distress, for instance, becomes frustration,
anger, defiance, sorrow, and sadness; pleasure becomes love, joy, affection, and amusement.
These humanized emotions can be expressed linguistically even when the individual is not
necessarily experiencing the emotion. Thus, one can say “I hate math” in a conversation with a
friend without actually experiencing at the moment the somatic response normally associated
with this emotion.

3 | THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT

To paraphrase colleagues working in the legal profession, the ZPD is far from settled law. By
this we mean that the ZPD has become one of the most controversial topics regarding its place
within Vygotsky's theoretical thinking. Before we can properly address the status of the concept
within the general theory, it is necessary to consider how the concept itself has been described,
especially in the English‐speaking world. The most famous definition, and the one that is
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arguably the most often cited, is found in Vygotsky (1987, p. 86), which describes the ZPD as
“the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem
solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under
adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers.”
Veresov (2017) highlights a number of issues with regard to the accuracy of the English
translation of Vygotsky's original Russian characterization of the process, beginning with the
fact that the English term “determined” is ambiguous and therefore can be interpreted as
“identified” or as “depends on” (p. 27). The implication therefore is that “actual development”
and “potential development” can either be “identified” or “depend on” problem solving with
adult guidance or in cooperation with more capable peers (p. 27). According to Veresov (p. 27)
Vygotsky's original text is unambiguous in its use of the Russian term meaning “identified.”
This is corroborated in a recent translation by Alex Kozulin of the written version of a lecture
Vygotsky delivered on the ZPD in the early 1930s (Vygotsky, 2011). In this text, Vygotsky
proposes that the ZPD is about identifying the psychological functions of school students that
are in the process of maturing rather than those processes that have already matured and
therefore reflect what the individual is able to achieve independently without mediation from a
teacher or in collaboration with more capable peers. The metaphor he used to characterize the
ZPD is, as we have already pointed out, reflects an agricultural perspective: “ZPD defines those
functions that are not mature yet, but are currently in the process of maturation, the functions
will mature tomorrow. These functions are not fruits yet, but buds or flowers of development”
(Vygotsky, 2011, p. 204). He used the same metaphor in other texts, such as the chapter entitled
“The problem of age” in the Collected works volume 5 (Vygotsky, 1998, p. 200), where he argued
that focusing only on the fruits of development without “ascertaining the processes that have
not yet matured” will result in an incomplete diagnosis of an individual's development.
Furthermore, Vygotsky recommended that it would be more effective for school instruction if
students were grouped according to their ZPD‐based diagnosis rather than their independent
performance based on such measures as IQ tests (Vygotsky, 2011).
According to Veresov (2017, p. 27), because of the construal of the English term ‘determined’
as more or less synonymous with ‘cause’ rather than ‘ascertain’ or ‘identify’ the learner assigned
a passive role and as such is “entirely dependent” on the adult rather than interacting in a
cooperative process in order “to create conditions for the development of those functions that
are at the very beginning of their development cycle”. Consequently, in Veresov's view, this
facilitated the substitution of “Vygotsky's strong living metaphor about buds and flowers” with
“a mechanical metaphor for scaffolds supporting a building being constructed”. In line with the
viewpoint expressed in the current article, Veresov (2017) concurs that scaffolding primarily
describes learning rather than a developmental process (p. 27).

3.1 | Theoretical Status of the ZPD

With regard to the theoretical status of the ZPD within Vygotsky's general theory, some re-
searchers, such as Newman and Holzman (1993), believe that it is a key concept especially with
respect to educational development. Others such as Gillen (2000) downplay the significance of
the ZPD as a concept in her claim that it is “little more meaningful than that of a learning
situation presented to a child, where adults and/or more advanced children directly or indi-
rectly have a positive influence on the child” (pp. 193‐194). Furthermore, she asserts that
Vygotsky was not all that interested in education, in the first place, pointing out that he
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produced only one book on the topic, which she translates (p. 196) as Pedagogical Philosophy,
which she claims had yet to be translated into English (p. 184), at least not by the date of the
publication of her own article. However, the work had indeed been translated into English as
Educational Psychology (Vygotsky, 1997c), and is based on three years of lectures that Vygotsky
delivered to teachers in his hometown of Gomel. If one reads through the six volumes that
comprise the collected works, it is clear that while Vygotsky did not write much in the way of
concrete pedagogical recommendations, other than what is contained in his 1997 book, he did
make significant pronouncements regarding the importance of formal education for the sys-
tematic development of higher psychology functioning (see below).
Yasnitsky (2019) also raises doubts about the place of the ZPD in Vygotsky's theory, on the
grounds of its belated appearance in his writings—1933, the year prior to his death—and
because it does not occupy a great deal of space in the overall body of his work (Yasnitsky, 2019,
p. 5). As further support for this stance, Yasnitsky points out that the concept itself did not
originate with Vygotsky but was at least in part a reformulation of Kurt Lewin's “field theory”
along with the work of educator Dorothea McCarthy, who suggested that educators should take
account of the difference between a student's actual and potential performance facilitated by
peer assistance. Van der Veer and Valsiner (1991, p. 347) claim that Vygotsky acknowledged
that the concept of ZPD did not originate with him. Indeed, these same authors in a later
publication (Valsiner & van der Veer, 2014, p. 153) note that Vygotsky's thinking regarding the
ZPD may have also been influenced by one of his favorite philosopher's, Henri Bergson, in his
writings on the “zone of possible actions or potential activity”.
We believe that those who minimize the relevance of the ZPD have failed to appreciate the
true significance of how Vygotsky conceptualized the process, even if he only addressed the
topic explicitly in three lectures delivered in 1933, the first in Moscow at the Epshtein Institute
of Experimental Defectology and the remaining two at the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute
(Valsiner & van der Veer, 2014). Valsiner and van der Veer (1993, p. 39) point to the fact that by
as early as 1931 Vygotsky's theoretical thinking was permeated with the notion that education
must be focused on “making of the future” and therefore had the responsibility of concen-
trating on the “social facilitation of developing functions”. For his part, Veresov (2017, p. 28)
concurs that Vygotsky saw a clear connection between the ZPD and “the foundations of the
theory” especially as expressed in the genetic law of cultural development, whereby every
higher psychological function arises first inter‐mentally in the social relationship between
individuals and then intra‐mentally as the processes at work in that relationship are
internalized.
Vygotsky (1987, pp. 207–209) proposed that the making of an individual's future is about
much more than what is described in Gillen's (2000) trivialization of the instructional process as
described above. It is, instead, about the vital dialectic unity formed by instruction and learning,
captured in the Russian term obuchenie, the educational process that according to Cole (2009)
has no appropriate English equivalent other than teaching‐learning understood as a unified,
inseparable activity. Obuchenie, in Vygotsky's words “creates the zone of proximal develop-
ment” and therefore “awakens a variety of internal developmental processes that are able to
operate only when the child [or adult] is interacting with people in his [sic] environment and in
cooperation with his peers. Once these processes are internalized, they become part of the
child's independent developmental achievement” (1978, p. 90). The ZPD then is the dialectical
unity of “learning processes and internal developmental processes. It presupposes that the one
is converted into the other” (p. 91).
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3.2 | The Social Situation of Development

As he revised his thinking on the development and functioning of higher mental processes,
Vygotsky began to explore the importance of emotion and how individuals not only react intel-
lectually but also emotionally to specific circumstances in which they find themselves. He real-
ized that even though two or more individuals may find themselves in what to an observer may be
the same objective context, the individuals may well experience and interpret the situation in
completely different ways. This is because the situation is refracted through the person's unique
history and personality in different ways. Moreover, the same individual encountering what is
ostensibly the same context at different points in time would likely experience and interpret it in
different ways because the person has changed over time and is in fact not the same person.
Cole (1996, p. 135) warns against “the pitfalls” associated with the traditional interpretation
of context “as that which surrounds” and reminds us that the noun derives from the Latin
contexere meaning “to weave together.” One of the problems that arises from the traditional
interpretation of the term is to assume that context somehow causes the behaviors that occur in
it (Cole, 1996, p. 134). Viewing context as a process of weaving together, however, dissolves the
boundaries between activity and that which surrounds and instead understands the relation as
fibers in a rope which are “discontinuous” but intertwined in a way that makes it appear as if
the rope were comprised of a continuous thread (Cole, 1996, p. 135). The mutual and unique
relationship between person and context Vygotsky called the social situation of development
(henceforth, SSD). In other words, while a situation may influence an individual, the nature of
the influence is at the same time shaped by the individual.
To illustrate how he conceived of SSD, Vygotsky (1994) relates the case of three siblings
brought to his clinic and who were being raised by a single, alcoholic and physically abusive,
mother. While each child's development was dramatically impacted by the situation, they each
reacted in a unique way to the mother's behavior. The youngest child felt terrorized, depressed,
developed a stammer, and suffered from involuntary nocturnal urination. The middle child
developed ‘a mother‐witch complex’ in which love and terror of the same person “coexist”
(Vygotsky, 1994, p. 340). The third, and oldest child, even though mentally delayed in his
development, nevertheless, manifested an unexpected degree of “maturity, seriousness and
solicitude” and realized that the mother was ill and “as senior member of the family” tried to
protect his siblings from her abuse (p. 341)
To an objective observer, it might seem that the environment for the three children was
the same; nevertheless, they each experienced and responded to it in a different way,
depending on their relative position within the family (see Bozovich, 2009 on the significance
of social position for development), as well as the maturational status of specific psychological
functions. Based on his reading of Vygotsky's (1998) discussion of the development of chil-
dren from birth to school age, Chaiklin (2003) distinguishes between an objective and a
subjective ZPD. Accordingly, he proposed that each age period beginning with infancy and
extending into adolescence includes specific types of structural relationships that are not
universal in the Piagetian sense, but are instead “historically constructed and objectively
constituted” by the particular culture in which children live (Chaiklin, 2003, p. 49). These
structural relationships comprise the Objective ZPD (henceforth OZPD). Included among the
OZPD are such leading activities as play (Vygotsky, 1978), schooling, leisure time activities,
and eventually, work. Leading activities are not always and everywhere the same. They
change throughout the course of the history of a community. For instance, the kind of play
activities that were promoted and valued prior to the digital revolution of the late 20th century
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were quite different from play activities that children have engaged during the first two
decades of the 21st century (for a fuller discussion of the developmental consequences of the
distinction see Karpov, 2005).
As children encounter a new OZPD typical of each historically determined age period the
expectation is that the structural relationships among the psychological functions for the new
OZPD will begin to mature in each child. The maturing functions can be characterized as
Subjective ZPD (henceforth SZPD). As children interact with others in their SSD (the dialectic
between OZPD and SZPD) qualitatively new structural relationships among the psychological
functions that form consciousness emerge (Chaiklin, 2003, p. 50). Vygotsky (2011) claimed that
the size of SZPD is a better predictor of school success than IQ. Children with a large SZPD (that
is, with many maturing functions) were more successful regardless of IQ level and children with
small SZPD (that is, with few maturing functions) were less successful regardless of IQ level.

3.3 | Play and the ZPD

Perhaps the best support for the argument that the ZPD is a broader and more robust process
than what is captured in the scaffolding metaphor comes from Vygotsky's account of play.
According to Vygotsky (1978, p. 94) the value of play in child development is that it creates
through imaginary situations (i.e., SSD) the opportunity to fulfill “tendencies that cannot be
immediately gratified” in real life. In play children act differently from their direct perception of
a reality. A child may perceive a broomstick but in play can conceive of it as a horse. The stick
serves as a “pivot” which detaches the meaning of horse from the real horse and assigns it to
another object, which at this point, still in some respect reflects the real object (Vygotsky, 1978,
p. 97). A broomstick can be mounted and ridden as can a real horse.
Through play children learn to regulate their own behavior not by real objects but by the
meaning they assign to those objects—an important step on the way to understanding the
function of symbols in human thinking. Moreover, because all forms of play entail rule‐
following behavior, even if the rules are not explicitly imposed in advance of the play activity
itself, children begin to develop the ability to self‐regulate in which immediate impulses to act
are inhibited depending on the specific social situation (Karpov, 2005).
In play children are able to act beyond their actual developmental level and above their “daily
behavior”; in play they seem to be “a head taller” than they are in reality (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 102).
Play produces a dynamic relationship between the child's imaginary behavior and development—
a ZPD, which may be comparable to the relationship between instruction and development, but
which “provides a much wider background for change in needs and consciousness” (p. 102)
because it entails action “in an imaginary situation, the creation of voluntary intentions, and the
formation of real‐life plans and volitional motives” (p. 102). Indeed, because of its link to motives
and voluntary intentions, Vygotsky (1997c) also suggested that play activity fulfilled an important
function in the development of moral behavior in children.

4 | ZPD AND THE INSTRUMENTAL METHOD

John‐Steiner and Souberman (1978, p. 128) in the Afterword to Vygotsky (1978) remark that
even though he carried out a good deal of his own research on children, “to view this great
Russian psychologist as primarily a student of child development would be an error”. Thus, it is
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a misunderstanding of Vygotsky's project to group him, as is often done, with arguably the most
well known developmental psychologist of all time, Jean Piaget. The reason Vygotsky was
interested in child development, as we suggested in our earlier discussion of his methodological
framework, was because “he believed it to be the primary theoretical and methodological means
necessary to unravel complex human processes” (p. 128). As it turns out, however, he was also
interested in other domains in which history was the key to understanding the formation of
human consciousness: the evolution of homo sapiens from their progenitors (i.e., phylogenesis)
and the development of cultures over time (i.e., sociocultural genesis); the emergence of
conscious thought over very brief spans of time, which Wertsch (1985, p. 54) refers to as
microgenesis (see Scribner, 1985 for a full discussion of time in Vygotsky).
Vygotsky's approach to laboratory research was firmly grounded in his general historical
methodology adopted from Marx. He variously referred to this aspect of his research as the
experimental‐developmental method, the method of double stimulation, or the instrumental
method. The point of this approach was to “artificially” provoke or create processes of interest
which Vygotsky believed would allow the researcher to observe, understand, and explain their
origin and formation (Vygotsky, 1978, pp. 61–61). In conducting instrumental research par-
ticipants are engaged in tasks that are assumed to be too difficult for them to carry out without
some form of external support, or mediation, such as might be provided by hints or clues from
researchers or peers, or by use of objects that can be assigned symbolic meaning, such as colored
strips of paper to remind a participant which color terms are proscribed during a narration task.
Through such research Vygotsky and his colleagues were able to document if and how par-
ticipants, often of different ages (e.g., pre‐school, school‐aged, adolescents, adults), were able to
integrate mediation into their thinking process.
Even though Vygotsky does not explicitly identify the instrumental method with the ZPD, in
our view, it closely mirrors its assumptions. We would like to suggest, therefore, that when
Vygotsky took the instrumental method out of the laboratory and introduced it into the
educational setting at that point he referred to it as the ZPD. Whether he borrowed the term
from others (see above), it seems clear to us that he formulated early on in his thinking a
process that is quite similar to the ZPD. Evidence to support our claim is found in the chapter
The instrumental method in psychology included in Vygotsky (1997a) where Vygotsky compares
his method to other methods, which he claims are designed to study either a child's natural
development uninfluenced by school or a child's schooled development independent of natural
factors:

the instrumental method studies the child not only as a developing, but also as an
educable being … by its very essence the instrumental method is a historical‐genetic
method. It introduces a historical viewpoint in the investigation of behavior … The
instrumental method studies the process of natural development and education as a
unified alloy and aims to reveal how all the natural functions of the given child are
restructured at the given level of education. (Vygotsky, 1997a, p. 88)

According to Vygotsky, education is the “artificial process of development” that “re-

structures all functions of behavior in a most essential manner” (1997a, p. 88). It does so
through “mastery of a psychological tool and, through it, of one's own natural mental function,
always lifts the given function to a higher level, enhances and broadens its activity, recreates it
structure and mechanism” (p. 89).
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Thus, the instrumental method when used in the laboratory setting allows researchers to
observe the history of the development of higher mental functions as participants are provided
various forms of mediation. When the procedure is brought into the educational setting, the
method itself becomes an instrument for intentionally promoting the development of students
through systematic forms of mediation. In the former environment, the goal is to understand
individuals not as they are but in the process of becoming what they not yet are (Bronfen-
brenner, 1977, p. 528). In the latter setting, the goal is to intentionally provoke students into
becoming what they not yet are. This is what Vygotsky meant by tool‐and‐result rather than
tool‐for‐result methodology (see Newman & Holzman, 1993).
Valsiner and van der Veer (1993, p. 39) corroborate our interpretation of the connection
between the instrumental method and the ZPD when they point out that the ideas Vygotsky's
brought to bear in his lectures on ZPD had already pervaded his theoretical thinking, including
the importance of the “social facilitation” of development, the relevance of “play and fantasy” in
reducing the distance between the present and the future, and the significance of social
interaction for the internalization process.

5 | A CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE SCAFFOLDING METAPHOR

Phenotypically (to borrow Vygotsky's terminology), scaffolding and mediation in the ZPD may
appear to be similar processes. However, as Vygotsky cautioned, appearances can be deceiving.
Our goal in this section is to outline the history of the scaffolding metaphor with focus on the
attempts that have been made to link it to the ZPD. Our concern is not with empirical findings
of studies informed by the metaphor but with the more theoretical arguments that attempt to
connect the two concepts.
According to Shvarts and Bakker (2019, p. 6), that the term appeared nearly a decade and a
half earlier in one of Ausbel's publications in describing the ideational support system for
children's verbal learning. However, Shvarts and Bakker note that Ausbel failed to define or
fully explore the implications of the metaphor. These same authors also attest (p. 8) a single
instance of the term in a chapter ostensibly written by Luria included in the co‐authored
publication by Luria and Vygotsky (1992). In this case, the metaphor was used to describe the
process through which children physically support themselves (e.g., holding on to a chair, or an
adult's hand) as they learn to walk. There is no evidence that Luria used the metaphor in any of
his neuropsychological work (Shvarts & Bakker, 2019, p. 9).
Shvarts and Bakker (2019, p. 13) highlight the fact that Luria had a close friendship with the
individual who played a significant role in bringing the work of Vygotsky and his colleagues to
the attention of the English‐speaking world, Jerome Bruner. They raise the possibility that Luria
may have mentioned the metaphor to Bruner at some point in their interactions. Indeed, ac-
cording to Bruner (1986, p. 71), he first became aware of Vygotsky and his concept of the ZPD at
a reception sponsored by Soviet researchers attending the 1954 Montreal international psy-
chology congress. Some eight years later, Bruner wrote the introduction to the first abridged
English edition of Vygotsky's most famous work, Thought and Language, published in 1962. Yet,
nearly a decade and a half later, Wood et al. (1976) do not mention either the ZPD or Vygotsky
in their article. Nevertheless, and without providing evidence to support her contention, Lajoie
(2005, p. 542) asserts that the concept of scaffolding was indeed influenced by Vygotsky's
definition of the ZPD. We are not sure why she would make such a statement other than
perhaps because of the presence of Bruner's name on the article. In what seems to be a follow
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up study on the effects of different teaching strategies (i.e., scaffolding) on task mastery, Wood,
Wood, and Middleton (1978) briefly reference Vygotsky's theory but again this is not in
conjunction with the ZPD.
With deference to Shvarts and Bakker's (2019) observations, we nevertheless believe it is
reasonable to credit Wood et al. (1976) for introducing ‘scaffolding’ into the educational and
developmental literature. Other researchers, for example, Smagorinsky (2018) and Walqui and
van Lier (2010), concur with this attribution.

5.1 | The goal of scaffolding: Fluency, mastery, development?

Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of the scaffolding literature is that the goal of scaffolded
interaction is not made entirely clear. In some cases, the goal is to help a learner attain the
ability to complete a task fluently and independently; in others, it is to learn; and in others it is
to develop a skill. To be sure, Bruner (1984, p. 95) appears to perceive a potential for devel-
opment at play in scaffolding as a knowledgeable other guides someone without knowledge to
“higher ground” or from “concrete thinking to a capacity to grasp broader, higher inferential
principles”. Lajoie (2005, p. 550), likewise, comments that scaffolding knowledge can result in
“deeper and richer” student understanding and can enable them to use this knowledge in new
contexts.
Turning now to an examination of Wood et al. (1976) [For purposes of discussion we rely
on the republication of this article as a chapter in Bruner (2006), which we cite as WBR].
Wood, Bruner, and Ross (2006, p. 199) note that it is usually assumed that learning in
childhood is a solo and unassisted process. According to WBR (p. 199), a good deal of child
“learning” entails interaction with a “tutor” who scaffolds the process “that enables a child or
novice to solve a problem, carry out a task or achieve a goal which would be beyond his [sic]
unassisted efforts”. The adult, in everyday life, and teachers in school, take responsibility for
aspects of particular tasks (e.g., solving a puzzle, completing a math problem) that are at first
beyond the child's ability and assign to the child “those elements that are within his [sic]
range of competence” (p. 199).
According to WBR to successfully scaffold a novice to independent and fluent “task
mastery” (p. 199) the tutor must have a theory of the task and how to complete it as well as a
theory of the tutee's abilities relative to the task (p. 206). Thus, appropriate feedback from a
tutor entails six functions: (1) recruit learners interest in, and requirements necessary for, task
completion; (2) reduce the degrees of freedom expected for learner contribution to task
completion, with the tutor carrying out the remainder, while at the same time encouraging
learners to take some risk in implementing a procedure; (3) maintain learner focus on, and
motivation for, task completion; (4) make salient relevant task features; (5) minimize de-
pendency on the tutor without making the process stressful for learners; (6) model potential
task solutions, which may entail “explication of a solution already partially executed by the
tutee” (p. 207).
Of the six functions, it is the final one that presents a real problem for those who equate
scaffolding with how Vygotsky conceptualizes the key developmental mechanism at work in the
ZPD, imitation. WBR conclude that “the only acts that children imitate are those they can
already do fairly well” (p. 207). Shvarts and Bakker (2019, p. 12) seem to agree with this
conclusion when they state that “the finding is consonant with the possibility of imitation,
which according to Vygotsky (1978) can take place only within the ZPD”. While Vygotsky did
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indeed stress the importance of imitation, along with collaboration, as “the source of all the
specifically human characteristics of consciousness that develop in the child” (Vygotsky, 1987,
p. 210), he proposed that “imitation is the source of instruction's influence on development”
(pp. 210‐211). Furthermore, unlike in the case of apes, which “can meaningfully carry out
through imitation only what he can carry out independently”, (p. 210), imitation in a child
“forms the path to master those activities that completely transcend the limits of his own
possibilities,” including “speech and all higher psychological functions” (Vygotsky, 1997a, pp.
211–212).
We believe that influenced by “the terminology of linguistics” en vogue at the time, WBR
proposed that for scaffolded assistance to be beneficial, “the learner must be able to recognize
a solution to a particular class of problems before he is himself able to produce the steps
leading to it without assistance” (p. 199). In other words, comprehension of a task must
precede performance of that task. There is, however, a significant problem with this char-
acterization of the relationship between comprehension and production. If a learner can
comprehend what is to be done before doing it, it implies that the ability in question is
already present in the novice and all that remains is to transfer it to the productive modality.
Clearly, this runs counter to Vygotsky's understanding of development in the ZPD. Wertsch
(1985, p. 166), commenting on his child‐adult puzzle‐solving studies, observed that “rather
than understanding the task and then doing it, the children seem to have done the task (as a
participant in interpsychological functioning) and then understood it”; that is, they came to
share the adult's definition of the situation. Similarly, Cazden (1981/1997), challenging the
linguistic dogma of the era, proposed that the ZPD required children to perform without
competence in order to develop competence.
In making the case that scaffolding is an appropriate metaphor to capture processes at work
in the ZPD, Shvarts and Bakker (2019, p. 16) suggest that the development of task competence
resulting from scaffolding as documented in WBR “exactly evokes” the developmental process
that arises in the ZPD. However, development for Vygotsky is most definitely not about task
competence, it is about transformation and generalization of a function that has been inter-
nalized as a consequence of mediation and imitation and therefore can be extended to new
activities. In other words, development for Vygotsky is not about task competence and effi-
ciency but about being able to deal with unanticipated events in the future. Said in an elegant
way, development through the ZPD is about “the construction of distance between the present
and the past, and overcoming the distance from the present to the future”. (Valsiner & van der
Veer, 1993, p. 35).

5.2 | Connecting the ZPD and scaffolding

According to Stone (1998a, p. 345), Cazden (1979/1983) was the first researcher to explicitly
connect scaffolding and the ZPD. While we have no reason to disagree with Stone, there is
nevertheless, in our view a question regarding precisely how strong a link Cazden envisioned
between the two processes. She suggested a similarity between mother‐child language games,
such as peekaboo, and picture‐book reading between teacher‐student in school and related both
activities to the ZPD (Cazden, 1983, p. 40). While she remarked that the adult's role in language
games has been described as a scaffold (Cazden, 1983, p. 42), she stresses that the scaffold must
self‐destruct to be “replaced by a new structure for a more elaborate construction”. She cautions
that scaffolds are not as dynamic as language games and therefore the metaphor is only helpful
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if this limitation is not lost sight of (p. 42). Clearly, the ZPD in Vygotsky's thinking is far more
dynamic than Cazden's description of scaffolding, a point that we return to later. Moreover, as
we have already noted in our discussion of the ZPD, and as Cazden (1983, p. 47) appropriately
highlighted, the ZPD is the process in which “learning must lead development”—a charac-
teristic generally omitted from discussions of scaffolding. To quote Vygotsky (1978, p. 89) on
this crucial principle: “thus the notion of a zone of proximal development enables us to pro-
pound a new formula, namely that the only ‘good learning’ is that which is in advance of
development”.

5.3 | The scaffolding metaphor

Stone (1993, 1998a, 1998b) examined the value of the “scaffolding metaphor”, especially with
regard to children with special needs. In doing so, he made several explicit connections to the
ZPD and eventually substituted the term scaffolding where it seems to us the ZPD is the more
appropriate term, given Vygotsky's commitment to semiotic mediation: “it is my assumption
that attempts to address these and other issues related to the semiotic dimension of scaffolding
will prove fruitful conceptually and empirically. Hopefully, such an approach will help us to
appreciate the implications of issues that Vygotsky only sketched for us” (Stone, 1993, p. 180).
The point we want to highlight is that in drawing parallels between the ZPD and scaffolding,
Stone leaves the impression that because scaffolding is generally used to refer to the process in
which adults lead children to participate in, and contribute to, processes they would otherwise
be incapable of, it must also be what the ZPD is all about as well. Indeed, as we have already
noted, but it bears repeating, many researchers when writing about scaffolding and the ZPD,
including Stone, fail to distinguish between learning and development and, more importantly,
do not highlight the central relationship that operates in the ZPD: learning leads development.
Stone (1998a, 1998b) expands his understanding of the scaffolding metaphor, especially
regarding its relevance for the field of learning disabilities. He begins his exegesis by attributing
the “impetus” for the metaphor to Vygotsky and the influence his work had on Bruner (Stone,
1998a, p. 345). He welcomes the shift away from the Piagetian “individual‐child‐learner” model
of development and toward a model in which adult assistance plays a key role in child
development—a shift, according to Stone “fueled in part by the wider availability of Vygotsky's
ideas in English” (p. 347). In fact, he asserts (p. 349) that “the most important elaboration of the
original metaphor was the explicit linkage of the dynamics captured by the metaphor with
Vygotsky's (1962, 1978) developmental theory” especially with regard to the “link to Vygotsky's
notion of the zone of proximal development, with its clear implication that not only the isolated
learning of new concepts and procedures but also genuine conceptual reorganization results
from scaffolded interactions”. While Vygotsky's writing might be rightfully given credit for
bringing adult‐child interaction to the fore, it is clearly not what his theory is about. In other
words, adding an interactional component to the picture of child development is surely a
positive step, it certainly does not capture the full power of Vygotsky's thinking on the devel-
opment and functioning of human consciousness (see Ratner, 2011).
Stone (1998a, p. 349) notes that several researchers have criticized the scaffolding metaphor
as “too bound to the special case of middle class industrialized societies” and that it has not paid
sufficient attention “to the social or cultural factors influencing the quality and potential utility
of that interaction”. He also points out that a good deal of the scaffolding research overlooked
the importance of peer assistance in some societies. A particularly important suggestion offered
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by some researchers, as acknowledged by Stone (p. 351), is that the metaphor should be
abandoned altogether because it adds little to Vygotsky's original notion of ZPD. Despite the
criticism, Stone (p. 351) offers three reasons to maintain the scaffolding metaphor. One is that
scaffolding has a long and “rich history” into how adults assist child development. Another is
that, unlike the misleading mind as computer metaphor, scaffolding “does not impose many
constraints on how one thinks about the phenomenon of interest (in this case, children's in-
teractions with others), and thus it does not, in and of itself, lead to a conceptual distortion of
such interactions. Finally, Stone (p. 351) argues that the metaphor highlights “one of the key
features of children's learning, namely, that it is often guided by others, who strive (explicitly or
implicitly) to structure learning opportunities”.
Responding to Stone's defense of scaffolding, Butler (1998, p. 380) objects to the metaphor
precisely because it constrains “our understanding of the interplay between individual and
social factors in learning” and while “it is critical to analyze in detail the nature of interactive
instruction, the characteristics defined need not be associated with the scaffolding metaphor”.
According to Butler (p. 381) the flaw in the metaphor is that as with literal scaffolds “there is a
predefined building to construct” and it is therefore the adult's task “to instruct students in such
a way that they internalize that structure”. For Butler (p. 381) this is a perspective “consistent
with a vision of instruction as the transmission of information that students reproduce in their
heads when they learn” and with “direct‐instruction approaches to strategy training, whereby
specific strategies are modeled, followed by guided, then independent, practice in the learned
skills”. Butler argues (p. 381) that such approaches to instruction expect students “to build
similar structures, following the blueprints provided by more experienced adults” who in fact
function as the architect of learning thus, obviating any role for students in developmental
design.
Others responding to Stone's defense of scaffolding have proposed alternative metaphors,
including one based on the concept of flying buttress typical of medieval European cathedrals.
According to Donahue and Lopez‐Reyna (1998, p. 399), a flying buttress, unlike a scaffold,
which is more or less a free‐standing object, is a support for, and at the same time, an integral
component of the structure it supports. While Stone (1998b, p. 411) sees some merit in this
metaphor because it reminds us of Vygotsky's notion of internalization, he ultimately rejects the
proposal on two grounds: the proposal was not intended “as a serious alternative” to scaffolding,
and more importantly, because it removes from consideration the temporary nature of support.
Assuming that the flying buttress metaphor is to be taken seriously, we believe that while it
might at least in part capture something of Vygotsky's proposal on internalization, it is not fully
satisfactory. Buttresses are always visible and therefore not fully internalized into the structure
of the building they support. In development that occurs through mediation in the ZPD in some
cases a newly appropriated ability may indeed be partly visible to an observer (e.g., when doing
complex arithmetic with paper and pencil) but in other cases the capacity becomes invisible and
can only be observed through historical analysis.
As Stone (1998a) develops his argument in support of scaffolding, he proposes that it is
necessary to abandon what he considers to be a simple view of the process in favor of a more
nuanced understanding in which the adult is not merely the “molder of a passive child” in favor
of an “image of scaffolding as a complex social process of communicational exchange and
conceptual reorganization through which knowledgeable others foster understandings and
capabilities” (p. 354). At odds with what WBR proposed regarding the need for the child to
comprehend the meaning of a task before being able to effectively participate in the scaffolding
process, Stone, rightly, in our view, maintains that “in a scaffolding situation, the child is led to
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participate in an activity whose full meaning has yet to be fulfilled. That is, the child is acting in
anticipation of full understanding and must develop an understanding from the actions in
which he or she is led to engage” (p. 354). This perspective is clearly more in line with
Vygotsky's general notion of learning leading development captured in the concept of the ZPD.
Scruggs and Mastropieri (1998) offer what is arguably the most powerful critique of the
scaffolding metaphor. They assert that it fails to generate any new insights into the learning
process largely because literal scaffolds are static objects that in reality do nothing, and therefore
the metaphor derived from this meaning fails to capture the dynamic nature of adult‐child
interaction. Indeed, the only agents involved in constructing a building are the workers, who
erect a scaffold as a means of actualizing the plans typically created by someone else (e.g.,
architect). The building and the scaffold are inert objects. Stone, however, counters that scaf-
folding is worth saving because “it served a generative purpose in its earlier history and is
therefore imbued with a rich meaning that evokes many key dynamics in learning and in-
struction” and as such while old timers in the field of child development no longer need to look
to the metaphor to generate new insights, it at least “may serve powerfully to orient novices” to
its descriptive power and to focus on the social rather than the individualistic nature of
development (Stone, 1998b, p. 410). While there may be some value in Stone's justification for
salvaging the metaphor, we nevertheless fail to see how it contributes to Vygotsky's approach to
psychological development and in fact it dilutes the power of his theory.
Pea (2004), a former graduate student of Bruner's at Oxford University, begins his analysis of
the scaffolding with a cautionary note that many researchers and educators would do well to
heed and which is at the heart of our critique of the connection between scaffolding and the
ZPD. Accordingly, Pea (2004, p. 423) believes that the concept “has become so broad in its
meaning … that it has become unclear in its significance”. He suggests that scaffolding “has
become a proxy for any cultural practices associated with advancing performance, knowledge,
and skills, whether social, material, or reproducible patterns of interactivity (as in software
systems) are involved”; consequently, he is reticent to extend the metaphor to configurations
beyond the individual (e.g., whole classrooms) or to “a cultural level” (p. 423).
Pea adds an interesting insight into at least one motivation behind the initial interest in
scaffolding. He points out that a group of psychologists and developmental linguists working at
Oxford and Nottingham universities were dissatisfied with Chomsky's theory of child language
acquisition and so were in search of alternative accounts for how children developed the ca-
pacity “to do productive things with words in interaction” (2004, p. 426). The research groups
eventually discovered Vygotsky's notion of the ZPD and drew parallels between it and scaf-
folding in order to counter the innatist arguments put forth by both Chomsky and Piaget. Even
though there was substantial disagreement between these two influential scholars regarding the
specifics of their respective innatist stances (see Piattelli‐Palmarini, 1979), their respective
theories were at odds with Vygotsky with respect to the central importance of the social
environment as the primary source of development.
Pea (2004) contends that “the seeds for the diffusion of the concept of scaffolding are already
latent in Vygotsky's (1962) influential writings” (p. 429). This is because, in Pea's view, Vygotsky
“brought together the informal and formal, the natural and the designed, to achieve his theo-
retical ends” (p. 429). Pea concludes that because of the natural and designed aspects of
Vygotsky's theory “scaffolding was destined to become a concept” which encompasses “features
of computer software, curriculum structure, conversational devices such as questions, and
physically literal examples of scaffolding in the learning of a complex motor activity like ten-
nis”. In this regard Pea argues for a dual axes for the processes that support learning: one axis is
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social, involving interactivity between adults and children and the other is technological that
entails “designed artifacts” (p. 429).
We have two objections to Pea's position. The first, as we have said more than once, is that
we do not see what scaffolding adds to Vygotsky's general theory. The theory is neither
enhanced through the scaffolding metaphor nor would it be diminished if the metaphor were to
be abandoned. The second is that the distinction between social adult‐child interactions and
interaction with designed artifacts as defined by Pea is problematic. In our view both types of
interaction are social. This is because interaction with “computer tools” (p. 430) is just as social
as human‐human interaction. After all, technology is designed by humans for interaction with
humans. To argue otherwise runs the risk of falling into the fetish trap that is typical of what
has become the misguided claim of so‐called new materialism in which the humanized world of
artifacts is imbued with agency (see Canagarajah, 2018 for an analysis of learning from a new‐
materialism perspective). Support for our position can be found in the following quote from
Marx:

Even when I am active scientifically, etc. — an activity, which I can seldom

perform in direct association with others — then my activity is social, because I
perform it as a man. It is only the material of my activity given to me as a social
product – such as the language itself which the thinker uses‐ which is given to me as
a social product. My own existence is a social activity, and therefore what I myself
produce, I produce for society and with the consciousness of acting as a social being
(Marx, 1963/1844, pp. 157‐158).

For his part, Vygotky insists that the fundamental causes of all social, mental and behavioral
changes “must be sought not in people's mind … but in changes in the means of production and
distribution. … Thus, in mankind the production process assumes the broadest possible social
character, [which] … encompasses the entire world. Accordingly, there arise the most complex
forms of organization of human behavior” (Vygotsky, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c, 1997d, p. 211).
Below we propose that encounters with artifacts of any kind always entail social interaction;
that is, I ∼ (virtual) You dialogues.
Pea elevates the scaffolding metaphor to the status of theory and suggests four interesting, if
not provocative, procedures for testing its status, one of which is especially problematic with
regard to Vygotsky's approach to psychology. Pea essentially argues for the need to assess the
predictive validity of scaffolding theory in order to predict “for any given learner and any given
task what forms of support provided by what agent(s) and designed artifacts would suffice for
enabling that learner to perform at a desirable level of proficiency on that task, which is known
to be unachievable without such scaffolding” (p. 443). This psychometric proposal is at odds
with how Vygotsky envisioned both development and his methodology for understanding and
explaining it. For one thing it undermines the agency of both the expert and the novice in the
scaffolded interaction. Chaiklin (2003, p. 55) seems to concur with our position when we points
out that there does not seem to be a principled way of sequencing mediation. Nevertheless, the
ZPD does entail a prediction of the types of mediation that are likely to guide an individual to
higher levels of thinking, but for Vygotsky this is not an a priori prediction. It is a prediction
based on the concrete responsiveness of an individual to mediation and the adjustments made
on this basis by a tutor or expert (see Poehner, 2008). It is important not to lose sight of the fact
that Vygotsky (1978, p. 73) describes development as a, “spasmodic and revolutionary” process
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characterized by “upheavals” and even complete cessation that restarts and follows for a time, a
“linear path.” Lantolf and Aljaafreh (1995) and Lantolf, Kurtz, and Kisselev (2017) document
the revolutionary quality of development among second language learners.
Finally, Pea (2004, p. 446) recommends that research on scaffolding should focus on illu-
minating “the nature of learning as it is spontaneously structured outside formal education”
because insights gained from understanding this process “can most richly inform instructional
design and educational practices”. Lajoie (2005, p. 543) appears to agree with Pea in showing
her support for the apprenticeship model of education proposed by Lave and Wenger (1991).
Daniels (2007, p. 324), however, cautions that the apprenticeship model may undermine the
unique contribution that schooling can make toward transcending “the constraints of the
everyday”. In the everyday world, serving an apprenticeship to become a master butcher, for
example, has a pre‐established end point—the skill of carving meat according to the patterns
agreed to by those who control the profession.
Egan (2002) chides educators and psychologists who, for nearly two centuries, have made a
commitment to the so‐called natural child on the assumption that if we can discover how
children learn in the everyday world and import this process into educational practice, it will
greatly enhance the likelihood of successful outcomes of schooling. In our own field, theories of
second language acquisition predicated on the natural child (e.g., Krashen & Terrell, 2000; Van
Patten, 1996) continue to exercise undue influence on educational practice. The problem with
the natural‐child approach, as Egan points out (p. 46), is that it has failed to produce the results
anticipated by its proponents. This is not surprising seen through the lens of Vygotsky's
argument that formal education is an activity designed to promote development through sys-
tematic, rigorous, and generalizable knowledge—a process that is and must be different from
the processes of development that unfolds in everyday life, otherwise schooling is of little value.
Shvarts and Bakker (2019, p. 17) believe there is a degree of ambiguity in the scaffolding
metaphor which has to do with whether the scaffold supports the workers (i.e., the learners)
and thus enabling them to reach locations they would be unable to otherwise, or whether it
provides temporary support for the building under construction. To conceptualize the workers
as learners is at odds with how most proponents of scaffolding see things. If we accept Shvarts
and Bakker's first interpretation, it would imply that the learners/workers construct their own
scaffold, leaving no room for social others to be involved in the process. If we accept their
second perspective, it would mean that the building represents the learners—a perspective we
have already critiqued as problematic if for no other reason than it is difficult to conceive of
building as agents with creative imaginations in the way that Vygotsky's understands children.

6 | CONCLUSION: COMPARING THE ZPD AND SCAFFOLDING

The ZPD is a concept that captures the revolutionary nature of development; its focus is on
maturing functions of consciousness; it is not limited to childhood ontogenesis, but is a process
open to adults as well, depending on access to new forms of mediation, including when we
learn languages beyond our native language. It has both an objective (OZPD) and subjective
(SZPD) perspective. It is, in Vygotsky's words a “collective form of ‘working together’”
(Vygotsky, 2004, p. 202) across an array of sociocultural activities, including play, school, work,
leisure, artistic, political, religious, economic, activities. It clearly encompasses social interac-
tion similar to what is typically assumed for scaffolding; but, as Marx and Vygotsky remind us,
because all higher human activity is social, even when we ostensibly act alone, others are co‐
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present. In Vygotsky's (1986, p. 59) words, human thinking is always “quasi social.” Vocate
(1994) captures Vygotsky's characterization of human thinking as a shift from I ∼ You dialogue
to I ∼ Me dialogue in which Me functions as You does in social interaction, questioning,
revising, suggesting, evaluating (i.e., mediating) proposals offered by I. Stetsenko (2017, p. 224)
coins a neologism to describe this new way of understanding the fundamental social, rather
than solipsistic, nature of individuals, “collectividual”. It would not be too difficult to conclude
from all of this that the ZPD may well be a durable feature of human life given that we regularly
interact not only with social others but will all kinds of “culturally constructed external
mediating devices” (Lawrence & Valsiner, 1993, p. 151).
The scaffolding metaphor suffers from two major shortcomings that preclude its coalescence
with the ZPD and its integration into Vygotsky's theory of general psychology. First, its scope of
operation is narrow when compared to how Vygotsky conceived of the ZPD and its relevance
for the development of higher human thinking. As we noted in our analysis, scaffolding is
limited to the interaction that occurs between novices and experts, whether they be parent,
teachers or peers. It does not take account of the dialectical unity between the individual and
the SSD, which is a crucial relation that influences how individuals (and communities) develop.
In this regard scaffolding does not address the position of, and the expectations placed on,
individuals “within the system of social relationships” established by institutions (e.g., family,
school, play settings, work, etc.), nor does it take account of what people bring to concrete
encounters in these circumstances in terms of previous experiences, level of development
(especially in the case of children) and needs (Bozhovich, 2009, p. 84). Scaffolding does not
make the crucial distinction between OZPD and SZPD.
Second, it is not clear what the outcome of scaffolded interactions ought to be: task fluency,
mastery, learning, or perhaps development. Although some researchers, such as Bruner see a
developmental potential in scaffolded interaction, as Valsiner and van der Veer (1993) pointed
out, it does not adequately address the relationship between learning and development that
distinguishes Vygotsky's approach to development from other models, in particular Piaget's.
Unlike for Piaget, who assumed that individuals would not profit from instruction until they
were developmentally ready, Vygotsky argued that instruction and development are two poles
of a unified dialectical process whereby instruction opens the path for development to follow
and development prepares the way for subsequent instruction to take root.
The final point of comparison is the difference in the metaphors that underlie the concepts.
Scaffolding, as we discussed is predicated on an architectural, and what some refer to as
“mechanical” (Veresov, 2017, p. 27). Consequently, it appears that the outcome of the con-
struction process is highly predetermined. Architects design buildings that are specific in terms
of their internal and external features. The workers who implement the architect's plans also
know what the outcome is to be and they use appropriate materials and tools, including
scaffolds, to bring this about. There is little doubt about the outcome and variations in quality
are minimized, unless some unforeseen event should intervene, such as cost overrun, or worker
strike, etc.
As for Vygotsky's agricultural metaphor, one could also argue that the outcome of the
developmental process guided by mediation is a specific fruit. In other words, apple seeds
produce apples, not oranges. While this may be true, what is unknown is the quality of the fruit
that emerges from the growing process. The outcome very much depends on the quality of care
the grower provides for the trees when they are budding and flowering. If the buds are
neglected (e.g., lack of proper irrigation fertilization) the buds may not even develop into
flowers, let alone into high‐quality fruit. For Vygotsky, the maturing buds and the flowers are
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the key entailments of his metaphor with regard to the process of development that he envi-
sioned taking place in the ZPD. From the biological perspective human embryos grow into
humans and not some other species, but the psychology of the person that arises from the
process of development is unknown from the outset and depends crucially on the quality of
care/mediation the individual has access to throughout life. Clearly, the entailments of the
scaffolding metaphor—building, scaffold, workers, pre‐established outcome represented in an
architect's blueprints—do not mesh well with Vygotsky's organic conceptualization of the
process. Moreover, what are the criteria for determining when a building is in the process of
maturing. Is it when the foundation is laid? Is it when the outside shell is completed? Whereas
with fruit trees, as Vygotsky makes clear, the maturation process that is relevant for develop-
ment is when buds and flowers appear.
As we have tried to show throughout our discussion, the concept of development that
permeates Vygotsky's theoretical thinking is reflected not only in his historical dialectical
methodology but also in his general approach to the formation of consciousness from childhood
to adult life. This encompasses the relation between the individual and the social environment
that constitutes everyday life dominated by spontaneous concepts as well as the systematically
organized relation between the person and the environment that comprises formal education
dominated by scientific concepts. In each domain the pivotal event is recognition and effective
mediation of maturing functions, to recall the statement of Valsiner and van der Veer (1993), in
order to increase the distance between past and present and decrease the distance between
present and future. It is difficult to capture the developmental process as envisioned by
Vygotsky through the scaffolding metaphor and for this reason we have argued that it has no
place in his theory of general psychology.

ORCI D
James P. Lantolf https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4131-8368

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How to cite this article: Xi J, Lantolf JP. Scaffolding and the zone of proximal
development: A problematic relationship. J Theory Soc Behav. 2020;1–24. https://doi.org/
10.1111/jtsb.12260