Abstract:

“If we don’t look, we won’t see.” That is the title of an Adlof & Hogan (2019) paper, in which they point out that oral language skills set the stage for the development of reading and writing skills in children, and therefore that evaluating oral skills regularly is an effective way of predicting later literacy development. Although Adlof & Hogan’s research is conducted within a different theoretical framework, their words are reminiscent of the Vygotskian concept of the “buds” of development (e.g., Bozhovich, 2009), according to which instructors should look at indicators of future development rather than just focusing on currently possessed knowledge or individual, unaided performance. This paper suggests that foreign/second/additional language (henceforth, FL) instruction should pay greater attention to this idea, focusing especially on writing instruction.

To elaborate on this notion, the paper reviews previous research in FL writing instruction. We begin with the seminal work in the sociocultural tradition of Aljaafreh and Lantolf (1994), which suggests employing Vygotsky’s notion of the zone of proximal development (ZPD; e.g., Vygotsky, 1978) to conceptualize assistance to learners and their responses to that assistance. In an effort to help individual writers correct errors made in their compositions, they suggest a framework of five stages of regulation (from other-regulation to self-regulation), to which 12 levels of assistance are mapped. The general idea is that learners requiring lower levels of assistance with a particular error display higher levels of self-regulation and are therefore more advanced in their understanding of the linguistic feature in question. Aljaafreh and Lantolf’s paper established a trend that is still visible today: an emphasis on microgenetic research where the focus is on changes that occur over the space of a few days or weeks (or sometimes even shorter periods of time). Such an emphasis allows us to observe language learning as it happens, rather than taking snapshots at intervals of multiple months or years and seeing only the results of learning. The key insight of such an approach is that students’ unaided output is not the only indicator of development; instead, we can observe learners making the same errors in “worse” or “better” ways, i.e. requiring more or less assistance to put them right. Errors made in “better” ways are likely to be eliminated from the learner’s output at a later time.

The remainder of the paper fleshes out a proposal for how to clarify the notions of the ZPD and movement through it (i.e. learning) metaphorically, and then how to quantify that change in cases where clear signs of learning are required. This includes an examination of the notions of imitation and internalization and a suggestion that consciously employing these notions may allow us to answer Bruton’s (2009) call for a greater focus on language expansion, something that is sometimes not addressed in a sufficiently systematic way in process approaches to writing (Emig, 1967, 1971). The suggestion is that, just as oral language skills “lead” the development of literacy, skills such as transcription and dictogloss (Wajnryb, 1990) may lead the development of independent writing skills and that this development can be best captured in the proposed framework.

Keywords:

Zone of proximal development, English as a foreign language, writing instruction.