Lev Vygotski's scaffolding and his Zone of Proximal development

His theory of the "Zone of Proximal Development" (ZPD), "Proximal" simply means "next". He observed that when children were tested on tasks on their own, they rarely did as well as when they were working in collaboration with an adult. It was by no means always the case that the adult was teaching them how to perform the task, but that the process of engagement with the adult enabled them to refine their thinking or their performance to make it more effective. For him, the development of language and articulation of ideas was central to learning and development. The common-sense idea which fits most closely with this model is that of "stretching" learners.
Full development of the ZPD depends upon full social interaction. The range of skill that can be developed with adult guidance or peer collaboration exceeds what can be attained alone. Vygotsky's theory was an attempt to explain consciousness as the end product of socialization. For example, in the learning of language, our first utterances with peers or adults are for the purpose of communication but once mastered they become internalized and allow "inner speech".

Principles:

1. Cognitive development is limited to a certain range at any given age.
2. Full cognitive development requires social interaction.

Bibliography:
http://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/social-development.html
http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/constructivism.htm#Vygotsky 

Jean Piaget- Cognitive Theory

According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent learning and knowledge is based.

There Are Three Basic Components To Piaget's Cognitive Theory:

1. Schemas (building blocks of knowledge)
2. Adaptation processes that enable the transition from one stage to another (equilibrium, assimilation and  accommodation).
3. Stages of  Development:
• Sensorimotor (birth - 2 years): When children differentiate themselves from objects. Recognises self as agent of action and begins to act intentionally: e.g. pulls a string to set mobile in motion or shakes a rattle to make a noise. Achieves object permanence: realises that things continue to exist even when no longer present to the sense
Preoperational (2-7 years): Learns to use language and to represent objects by images and words. Thinking is still egocentric: has difficulty taking the viewpoint of others  Classifies objects by a single feature: e.g. groups together all the red blocks regardless of shape or all the square blocks regardless of colour
Formal operational (7-11 years): Can think logically about objects and events Achieves conservation of number (age 6), mass (age 7), and weight (age 9)
Classifies objects according to several features and can order them in series along a single dimension such as size.
Concrete operational (11 and up): Can think logically about abstract propositions and test hypotheses systemtically, becomes concerned with the hypothetical, the future, and ideological problems 

Theories:

Adaptation	What it says: adapting to the world through assimilation and accommodation.
Classification	The ability to group objects together on the basis of their common features.
Class Inclusion	The understanding, more advanced than simple classification, that some classes or sets of objects are also sub-sets of a larger class. (E.g. there is a class of objects called dogs. There is also a class called animals. But all dogs are also animals, so the class of animals includes that of dogs)
Conservation	The realisation that objects or sets of objects stay the same even when they are changed about or made to look different.
Decentration	The ability to move away from one system of classification to another one as appropriate.
Egocentrism	The belief that you are the centre of the universe and everything revolves around you: the corresponding inability to see the world as someone else does and adapt to it. Not moral "selfishness", just an early stage of psychological development.
Operation	The process of working something out in your head. Young children (in the sensorimotor and pre-operational stages) have to act, and try things out in the real world, to work things out (like count on fingers): older children and adults can do more in their heads.
Schema (or scheme)	The representation in the mind of a set of perceptions, ideas, and/or actions, which go together. In more simple terms Piaget called the schema the basic building block of intelligent behavior – a way of organizing knowledge. It is useful to think of schemas as “units” of knowledge, each relating to one aspect of the world, including objects, actions and abstract concepts.
Stage	A period in a child's development in which he or she is capable of understanding some things but not others

Terminology:
Asmmilation: The process by which a person takes material into their mind from the environment, which may mean changing the evidence of their senses to make it fit.
Accommodation: The difference made to one's mind or concepts by the process of assimilation.
Note that assimilation and accommodation go together: you can't have one without the other.
 

Bibliography:

http://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html 

http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/piaget.htm 

Sample Methodology Paragraph

Investigation Title: How does language change as children grow up?
For my investigation I intend to visit a primary school in order to get some data in which I will use for my investigation. I will do this by separating different classes into three groups, the first group will be made up of 6 girls, the second group will be 6 boys and the third group will consist of 3 boys and 3 girls, for the last group I will randomly select 4 from each group to make my investigation more reliable. By separating the groups like this I can clearly see how different each of the groups speak between each other when the other sex isn't there, this will be interesting to analyse and see after my investigation. Each group would then have to take part in an activity which involves 3 pictures being placed in front of them (some of the pictures will be stereotypically mostly aimed at females other at males, and one will be a gender neutral image) once the pictures are in front of them, I would like the children to talk about them, while they do this I will record them speaking. Every group will be presented with the same 3 images. I will then repeat this experiment for ages 4, 7 and 9 this will hopefully give me accurate comparability data to support my investigation about 'how language begins to affect gender?'. From my recordings I will then annotate any stereotypical language use for both males and females as well as annotating some theories from Deborah Tanning (including overlapping, length of sentences and pauses, tag questions, number of speaking turns taken, politeness and formalities) I think this will especially be seen when both sexes are speaking between each other. After I have done this, I intend to analyse my annotated phrases and then explain the effect that the language is having and how language is changing as children grow up. My only concerns are if only certain members of the group are speaking so I will not get a variety of language to analyse. To make my data as accurate as possible I will not direct the conversation only encourage it by trying to get the children to elaborate on their points if the conversation is quite and would limit my data, however I dont want to talk too much as this may decrease the reliability of my data. I could write some prompts for them to use, or circle specific things in the pictures for them to comment on, this would mean I would talk less but I would be directing the conversation. Therefore, I will only write 3 senetnces for each picture that will not highlight anything in specific, the children will then be able to awnser the questions and give me reliable data for me to use.

Investigation 1

Mini investigation:

Hypothesis:

Positive reinforcement will have a positive effect on the behaviour of the child, centred on Skinner's theory ‘Operant Conditioning’.

Introduction:

I have chosen to explore child directed speech and how this affects the child. My data has come from the ‘All the things’ video, where Evie’s Grandmother constantly rewards Evie’s with positive reinforcement. The transcript for the video lasts for 2 minutes and I will use this data to support my hypothesis as well as collecting data that contradicts with my hypothesis to compare with.

PEE Paragraph:

Some of the evidence that I have found supports my hypothesis, for example:

E          picture [pɪʧɘ] of me

G         yeah it is a picture of you (.) hahaha that’s a lovely smile (.) right now what else shall we do?
E          that nice
G         that’s lovely
E          (inaudible) …smile
G         it is nice smiling (.) hahaha
E          I smile
G         you are sm-
E          (inaudible)
G         ah you’re smiling a nice smile (.) now who else shall we get from this house?
In this sample the grandmother is providing Evie with positive reinforcement and Evie searching for praise after receiving some she continues to smile, Evie keeps saying "smile" which makes her grandmother laugh. By carrying on smiling most likely due to the comments and the reaction she is receiving, Evie then ignores her grandmothers attempt to change the topic by asking her Evie a question and continues to smile "hahaha that's a lovely smile (.) right now what else shall we do?", because of the grandmothers reaction of praise and laughter. She then repeats this hoping to receive more praise from her grandmother, she repeats this  a further four times.  Only 9% of the grandmothers language is interrogatives, she is taking cues from Evie and is questioning them, only a small amount of her language is actually telling Evie what to do, Evie mainly chooses what she does depending on the reaction she receives.

Analysis:

My data is unreliable as I only have data from child, this means that I can’t compare how other parents or carers speak to their children and only how Evie’s Grandmother speaks to her. This gives me little context and comparability data beyond the recordings of the participations relationship. 

Conclusion and Evaluation:

After looking at my data, my hypothesis is correct, when Evie is being rewarded for her positive behaviour we can see she repeats it as she wants more praise from her grandmother (when smiling).However, there are many limitations to my investigation, one being how Evie’s behaviour has already been affected by her parents and we don’t know how the Grandmother has affected the language (especially if the grandmothers language is different from her parents). As well as, isn’t the lack of data I had to begin with and then the limiting comparability data that I have overall. Also there may have been the observes paradox where Evie possibly controlled what she said and stopped herself from saying/doing what she wanted.

Evie Transcript Work

To what extent is this an example of child led discourse? What is characteristic of the two participant’s language?

Evie is being recorded by her grandmother while playing with her toys, she is 2 years and 7 months old and is in her ‘telegraphic /post telegraphic stage’. This is an example of child led discourse because Evie is the one who chooses topics but her grandmother is encouraging her to speak by asking her tag questions as well as trying to make her elaborate on what she’s saying; she asks her basic questions like ‘what’s that? (2) Who is it?’ the two second pause indicates that Evie is thinking about what to say and is trying to find her words, so the grandmother rephrased the question to a different one. Evie doesn’t finish her words or sentences and has long pauses sometimes but her grandmother tries to finish them for her (encouraging her to practise to use more words) e: ‘(2) gon (.) get (.) out now’ and g: ’he wants to get out okay’ her grandmother is trying to encourage her interaction with adults around her to support her language development (LASS- Language Acquisition Support System). At the start of the transcript we can see that Evie uses very simple language due to her age, she mainly starts off with using just nouns to communicate with her grandmother and misses some prepositions and throughout this conversation Evie doesn’t really look at who she is speaking to (her grandmother) and seems like she is almost just talking to herself, this is shown in: e: ‘(2) one two’ g: two cats (2) how many things have we got now in the picture?’, as shown previously her grandmother is again trying to teach Evie, but this time she’s teaching her how to count. To show she is still in the telegraphic stage Evie makes a grammatical error which she ‘no put it all’, but I think she means that she has got it all. She frequently uses action words like ‘go’ and ‘now’ to communicate with her grandmother what she means. Evie also uses may phonemic expansions and contractions showing how she is trying to practice her language and experiment with sounds (examples: ‘sho-o-o-w’ – phonemic expansion and ‘gon’ – meaning going to, phonemic contraction).

Answers to questions:

1) There are four different pronunciations that Evie uses to say ‘picture: picture [pɪʧɪt], picture of [pit ɘv], picture of [pɪtɘ], picture [pɪʧɘ]. All her pronunciations start with ‘pi’ but some of them contain an ‘f’ sound or other sounds which wouldn’t normally be found in ‘picture’. However some of the sounds found in ‘picture’ she does use but says them in the wrong order.

2) Throughout the transcript Evie’s grandmother tries to encourage her to speak by using tag questions and trying to get Evie to elaborate on what she’s saying. As well as trying to get her to engage with the conversation by giving her ‘activities’ or tasks she can do. Overall, the grandmother uses 57 things to encourage Evie to speak and support her talking.

3) The grandmother is encouraging Evie to speak by adding questions and trying to engage her more into the conversation ‘how many? Count them’ she uses a forceful verb to try and get her to develop her language and mathematic skills.

4) Overall, the out of the 51 utterances Evie’s Grandmother makes 34 of them are questions; the main functions of Evie’s grandmother asking questions are to encourage her to speak and to encourage her to elaborate on what she says and sometimes to guide the conversation into a certain direction.

5) The misunderstanding was that Evie went to look and find the actual bath tub that’s in the house, when instead her Grandmother meant the toy one in the wooden house.

6) The switches between the real and play world are interesting because Evie could possibly be unaware about the toy world and she is incorporating her knowledge about what she uses and then assumes that everything else could do the same thing as her and have the same needs.

7) As Evie is aware of the camera she may have the observer’s paradox which can change her language and she may be more conscious of her language and become a little bit nervous. This could have the effect that some of the things she says are unusual or she says less because the camera is watching her, although behind the camera is her grandmother who she acts comfortable around- which might bring up her confidence.

8) Evie says ‘kangaroo’ in four different ways: kangaroo [kænɪru:], kangaroo [kænɘru:], kangaroo [kæmɘrɒn], kangaroo [kæŋru:]. I agree with the statements ‘trying to get it right’ and ‘creative experimentation with sounds and words’ because she is in the telegraphic stage, Evie still needs help pronouncing some words but gets on well with other words. She needs to practise saying these words more so next time she will get it right.

9) The non-standards forms of English that Evie uses like ‘fings’ and ‘a-coming’ can be associated with the Durham accent.

10) Evie is in the telegraphic stage which means she is still learning language and still sometimes gets things wrong because she is learning but she’s still trying to develop her language.

Methodology Plan

Investigation: When does language begin to affect gender?

Data collection:

• Variety of different age groups that can show a possible change in language
• I am going to collect data from boys and girls ages 4/7/9/12
• I'm going to record 8 girls/boys from each age group (this will give me reliable comparisons as well as a big enough sample data to make it reliable
• I am going to record children speaking, to do this I am going to present them with the same images to try and encourage conversation)
• The boys and girls will both be shown the same images and hopefully be around the same table so I can clearly see how boys and girls speak when they are around each other
• I may record the boys speaking with each other and then record the girls speaking with each other and then record both genders speaking

Data processing:

• I will analyse the (from my recordings) the typical gender language from Deborah Tanning
• Including: length of sentences, length of pauses, length of text in words, number of speaking turns, number of interruptions, tag questions

Problems:

• Some children may be shy and not want to speak
• May be overlapping, so I wouldn't be able to understand clearly from my recordings what some children were saying
• Possible friendships between some children may encourage the speaking of certain people and not others