English Language Teaching in its Social Context

254 NEIL MERCERA socio-cultural perspective on classroom interactionI now wish to relate the above discussion of language as the medium of teaching-and-learningto a consideration of the quality of education.To do this, I will draw on a particular approachto human learning and devclopment which is known as sociocultural psycholou.This approachhas emerged during the final dccadcs of the twentieth century from a belated appreciationof the pioneering research on the relationship between language and cognitive developmentcarried out by the Russian psychologist Lcv Vygotsky (for example, Vygotsky, 1962).Vygotsky worked in Moscow in the 1920s and 30s, in an institution for children who hadspecial educational needs, but his ideas on the process of teaching and learning have muchbroader educational relevance than the specific institutional settings in which he put theminto practice. Vygotsky gave language a special, important role in human cognitivedevelopment, describing human individuals and their societies as being linked by languageinto a historical, continuing, dynamic, interactive, spiral of change. Led by the example ofJerome Bruner (1 985,1986), a considerablc body of research has now emerged which USCSa ‘neo-Vygotskian’ , socio-cultural perspective in the analysis of educational processes. Someof the most significant and distinctive implications of adopting a socio-cultural perspectiveon classroom education are, I belicvc, as follows:Language is our most important pedagogic tool. Although they do not necessarily make thisexplicit, I suggest that the most influential socio-cultural theorists of cognitivedevelopment (as represented by such as Bruner, 1986; Wertsch, 1991 ; Rogoff, 1990)ascribe three important functions to language: (a) as a cognitive tool whose acquisitionenables children to gain, process, organize and evaluate knowledge; (b) as a culturaltool, by which knowlcdge is shared, stored and made available to successivegenerations; (c) as a pedagogic tool by which intellectual guidance is provided tochildren by other peoplc.Thcsc roles are inextricably intertwined. To this specificationof the roles of language we might add the comment: learning how to use languageeffectively as a cultural tool is an important educational goal for native speakers aswell as second language learners. So language is both the tool for carrying outteaching-and-learning and also that which is meant to be learnt and taught.Education is a dialogical, cultural process. The development of students’ knowledge andunderstanding is shaped by their relationships with teachers and other students, andby the culture in which those relationships are located. (Newman, Griffin and Cole,1989; Gee, 1996).The educational success students achieve is only partly under theirown control, and only partly under the control of their teachers. This is where thesociocultural concept of ‘scaffolding’, which I mentioned briefly earlier, is useful .Theessence of this concept, as developed by Bruner (1986), Wood (1988) and others, isthat an effective teacher provides the kind of intellectual support which enableslearners to make intellectual achievements they would never accomplish alone; andone way they do $0 is by using dialogue to guide and support the development ofunderstanding.Language carries the history .f classroom activity into its future. The socio-culturalperspective suggests that if we want to understand the proccss of learning, we muststudy not only what a learner does but also the activities of parents, teachers, peerswho create ~ indeed, constitute - the dynamic context of their learning experience(Edwards and Mercer, 1987; Hicks, 1996). Rogoff (1990) talks of children beinginvolved in a process of ‘guided participation’ in thc intellectual life of theircommunitieq, which implies the neccssary involvement of others. For similar reasons,