Page 125 - Beyond Methods

Facilitating negotiated interaction 113 Interaction as an Ideational Activity
Recall the operational definition given earlier for interaction as an ideational activity. Essentially, it involves a cognitive awareness of, and a sociocultural sensitivity to, the external world and its impact on the formation of individual identities. It puts a premium on the ideas and emotions participants bring with them owing to their past and present experiences both in and outside the learning and teaching environment. In short, interaction as an ideational activ- ity focuses on the complex relationship between the individual and the social, particularly the impact of the social on the individual (see also Chapter 11).
THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE SOCIAL
As Michael Breen rightly pointed out during the early days of the interactional studies, interaction is more than a sociolinguistic pro- cess; it is “a socio-cognitive process which continually relates social action and experience to the content and capabilities of the mind, and vice versa” (1985, p. 155). What this means is that an individual’s interactional behavior and its impact on the learning process can hardly be interpreted in terms of linguistic and sociolinguistic fea- tures of input and interaction alone. What also need to be seriously taken into account are the sociopsychological and sociocultural forces that shape that behavior. In drawing our attention to the sociocognitive aspect of interaction, Breen was, in part, echoing the Vygotskyan approach to language acquisition.
The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky emphasized the role played by social interaction in the development of language and thought. According to him (Vygotsky, 1963), meaning is constructed through social interaction. For language learners, social interaction can occur when they interact with competent speakers of the target language, and when they interact with themselves (Vygotsky called it “private speech”). It is this social interaction that shapes and so- lidifies learning.
Social interaction entails active participation on the part of the learners. Their participation is guided by competent speakers whose utterances should be within, what Vygotsky called, the learners’ zone of proximal development (ZPD). He defines this zone as the distance between the actual level of language development and the level of potential development. Notice the two crucial factors