The ‘D’ Is for Development: Beyond Pedagogical Interpretations of Vygotsky’s ZPD

It has now been 15 years since Applied Linguistics published Celeste Kinginger’s ‘Defining the Zone of Proximal Development in US Foreign Language Education’. Hers was a ground-breaking article, but it found that the studies done in US foreign language teaching using the zone of proximal development (ZPD) had very little in common. Some would conceptualize the ZPD traditionally in terms of skills; others, more progressively, in terms of scaffolded interactions or metalinguistic understandings. Yet if we return to the source of the ZPD, in Vygotsky’s own work, we can easily see that the studies cited by Kinginger, as well as the vast majority of Vygotsky-inspired studies that have followed on, actually have far more in common with pedagogy, and thus with each other, than they do with Vygotsky. Vygotsky was a teacher, but what he taught was not pedagogy. Instead, he worked in ‘defectology’ and then ‘pedology’, two now defunct disciplines that dealt, from the negative and positive side respectively, with child development. So, first of all, Vygotsky (1998: 195, 283) limited his scheme of zones or ‘age periods’ of development to the years from birth to 18 years and explicitly excluded adults. Yet all of the studies reviewed below, all of which followed Kinginger 2002, have taken university students as subjects. Secondly, Vygotsky held the ZPD to be a ‘diagnostic’ measure (Schneuwly and Léopoldoff-Martin 2012). Yet even work that has attempted to use the ZPD as an assessment device (e.g. the ‘dynamic assessment’ approach in Poehner and Lantolf 2010, 2013) has emphasized formative assessment for pedagogy. Thirdly, the ‘D’ in ZPD stood for development and not for learning, and for Vygotsky this meant ontogenesis rather than what authors in these pages have called ‘microgenesis’, a term Vygotsky himself does not use (in his time it referred mainly to perception). Yet because of this ‘microgenetic’ focus, the categories of skills, scaffolding, and metalinguistic awareness that Kinginger established will still serve to categorize the studies which tried to till soil that she broke.