Abstract:

In recent decades, there has been a clear “social turn” (Firth & Wagner, 1997) in second language acquisition research, whereby basic constructs of the standard theory, including that of acquisition, have been challenged. The field of second language writing is no exception, and the reconceptualization of written corrective feedback in sociocultural terms can be said to have begun in earnest with Aljaafreh and Lantolf’s (1994) paper on “graduated” feedback carried out with sensitivity to each learner’s zone of proximal development (ZPD; Vygotsky, 1978).

This reconceptualization of writing and especially of feedback has not proceeded smoothly, as can also be said of other areas of second language acquisition research. As documented by, e.g., Lavin (2019), there are times when different writers appear to be referring to the same phenomena and making similar claims but the terminology that they use obscures these commonalities. At other times, strange distortions of other viewpoints occur; see, for example, research where ZPD-sensitive feedback is contrasted with indiscriminate feedback, and the superiority of the former is used to infer that a sociocultural approach is superior to a “conventional” approach. Accepting this claim would seem to imply that teaching outside Vygotskian approaches is carried out without any sensitivity to the needs of learners.

Taking the seminal Aljaafreh and Lantolf paper as a starting point, the present paper reviews the past quarter-century of research in this vibrant area. The presenter assesses the attempts to incorporate notions such as the ZPD, scaffolding, internalization, imitation, mediation, and dynamic assessment into writing instruction and looks at the promise of recent developments such as the use of psycholinguistic tools in dynamic assessment to measure development in an objective way.

Keywords:

Second language research, writing, ZPD, sociocultural theory, feedback.