Research Methods and Sociocultural Approaches in Second Language Acquisition

Since the publication of Frawley and Lantolf’s 1985 study, there has been a signifi cant increase in second language acquisition (SLA) research using sociocultural approaches that draw from Vygotsky’s theoretical framework and methodological approach. Researchers interested in diverse facets of SLA both in and out of educational contexts have utilized sociocultural theory in a variety of ways. Some have focused more on the internal aspects of language, the mental processes involved in making and communicating meaning through language acquisition, while others have focused more on the social, cultural, physical, and historical contexts of second language learning and acquisition. While researchers have relied on different interpretations and aspects of sociocultural theory, they all strive to understand second language learning and acquisition considering the role of sociocultural context as a mediating force in language development and use. They also recognize the essential role of semiotic mediation—making meaning through signs—in the development of the mind. Lantolf (2000, p. 18) draws on the memoir of one of Vygotsky’s closest collaborators, Alexander Luria’s The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology, to describe sociocultural approaches. Because sociocultural research seeks to study mediated mind in the various sites where people engage in the normal activities affi liated with living, it undertakes to maintain the richness and complexity of “living reality” rather than distilling it “into its elementary components” for the purpose of constructing “abstract models that lose the properties of the phenomena themselves” . . . On this account, explanation of human activities is about observation, description, and interpretation guided by a theory that is careful not to compromise “the manifold richness of the subject.” (Luria, 1979, pp. 174, 178) Ever-developing systems of systems made manifold in complex, dialectical interconnections of mind and matter were the subject of Vygotsky’s work. He advocated methods that were appropriate to the matter being studied—the unifi cation of thinking and speaking processes —and not just methods borrowed from the natural sciences, which is what psychology had in an effort to be recognized as an authentic fi eld of science. He saw a dialectical relationship between theory and praxis in which testing theory in practice infl uenced the development of methodology. The challenge faced by researchers developing sociocultural approaches to SLA research is similar to the one Vygotsky faced, since SLA research, in order to be accepted as a fi eld, has also relied on methods developed by the natural sciences. In a special edition of the Modern Language Journal, Alan Firth and Johannes Wagner (2007) refl ect back on their call ten years earlier for a reconceptualization of SLA, “for a theoretical, methodological, and epistemological broadening of SLA” to create “an SLA that was more interactionally sensitive, that also made room for an emic stance towards fundamental concepts, and that took seriously the theoretical and methodological consequences of a social view of learning and language” (2007, p. 804). They called for developing a perspective that includes language users in their social, cultural, and historical contexts.