A Vygotskian Sociocultural Perspective on Immersion Education

Merrill Swain plenary, given at the 2012 Language Immersion Education conference.
Abstract:
Vygotsky was born in Russia in 1896 and died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of 37. Although his life was short, it was remarkably full and prolific. Vygotsky spoke Russian, English, German, Hebrew and French, and also studied Latin, Greek and Esperanto. He had careers as a literary and theatre critic, teacher, developmental psychologist and researcher. Over the last several decades, his writings have been translated into English and have had considerable impact in some educational and psychological settings in North America.

In this talk, I will discuss several of Vygotsky's key ideas and their relevance to immersion education. For example, Vygotsky argued that our ability to think/learn develops from our interactions with others and artifacts in our environment. These interactions are mediated by language. This means that language is not only a communication skill, but importantly, it is a tool that mediates learning and development. These ideas have implications for both language learning and the learning of academic content with respect to the use of collaborative dialogue and private speech, and the use of the first and target languages. These ideas also have implications for the appropriateness of different immersion models given sociopolitical contexts and students' linguistic histories.

For more information about the speaker and the conference:
http://www.carla.umn.edu/conferences/...