Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of mind (1978) highlights the interdependence of the individual, social community and interactions in the construction of knowledge. The theory has been widely adopted in the area of applied linguistics research, and it has been employed to explain second language learning processes (Storch, 2013). The stated aim of this 192-page book is to introduce the key conc...

With the latest paradigm shift in SLA from Cognitivism to Sociocultural Theory (SCT), more studies are carried out to investigate the efficacy of Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) through a social and cultural lens. A more recent offspring of SCT is Activity Theory which provides an explanatory framework for scrutinizing an activity in a social setting. The present study aimed at investigating ...

This paper reviews the studies on teaching writing from a sociocultural framework. Vygotskyan Sociocultural theory of mind (SCT) has been presented as an alternative to mainstream research in second and/or foreign language learning and teaching contexts. This paper examines key elements of writing from a SCT perspective and reviews the studies on writing according to their orientations. It grou...

The intent of this chapter is to familiarize readers with the principles and constructs of an approach to learning and mental development known as Sociocultural Theory.1 Sociocultural Theory (SCT) has its origins in the writings of the Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky and his colleagues. SCT argues that human mental functioning is fundamentally a mediated process that is organized by cultura...

James P. Lantolf is George and Jane Greer Professor Emeritus of Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics and former director of the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics in the same academic unit at Xi’an Jiaotong University. He is founder of the Sociocultural Theory...

Sociocultural theory (SCT) is a powerful basis for exploring and guiding L2 (second/foreign language) learner development. For the most part, however, focus of classroom SCT-L2 has been on single activities, example, teacher mediation learners’ writing process or peer scaffolding. In this paper, we expand these studies, building Vygotsky’s (1997) metaphor as creator We propose how activities (1...

For centuries the speculations on man's mental functioning posed a great challenge for the scholars in various disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, sociocultural studies, education, ethnolinguistics, discourse analysis, literary criticism. Researchers have been pondering over the ticklish question: is it the mind making the human society, or is it the society that shapes up the human min...

Since the mid 90s, an increasing number of researchers have adopted a sociocultural theory (SCT) of mind to investigate the social and cognitive functions of language during learnerlearner interaction (Lantolf & Thorne, 2007). Researchers from an SCT perspective have identified that first languages (L1s) serve important cognitive functions (Alegría de la Colina & García Mayo, 2009; Storch & Ald...

Grounded in sociocultural theory (SCT), this study explored whether the hypothesized difference in task-induced involvement could affect the actual realization of evaluation, one of the cognitive dimensions of the Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH). A group of 24 Iranian EFL learners participated in the study. They were paired up to write a composition including ten unknown words in the ...