Sociocultural Theory and Corpus-Based English Language Teaching

Abstract

1 INTRODUCTION

Although Sociocultural Theory (henceforth, SCT) originated nearly a century ago in the writings of Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky, historical circumstances meant that the theory began to influence international research communities only in the 1980s. Since its introduction to the second language (L2) field (e.g., Frawley & Lantolf, 1985), central concepts such as mediation, internalization, and zone of proximal development (ZPD) have become widely invoked to understand processes of instructed L2 development. From the early 2000s onward, much L2 SCT scholarship has sought not merely to analyze learner development but to actively guide it through pedagogical practices informed by the theory (see Lantolf & Poehner, 2014).

To date, relatively few L2 SCT studies have been carried out in conjunction with corpus linguistics. In this paper, we outline central principles from the theory, with particular attention to how they have been brought into the L2 field. Included here is a line of scholarship that has employed the theory to organize L2 curricula around linguistic concepts and to design activities and resources intended to support learner engagement with them. This work, referred to as concept-based language instruction (C-BLI), provides fertile ground for uses of corpora to help teachers understand learner language abilities and to provide examples of language that illustrate the concept under study. After explaining common procedures associated with C-BLI, we offer examples from recent studies that suggest how the integration of this work with corpus linguistics might enrich L2 education. We then provide suggestions for future research.