Vygotsky and Bruner

When talking about the learning of a foreign language and the cognitive theories supporting it, it is necessary to pay close attention to the two major figures in the field: Vygotsky and Bruner.
Vygotsky, in accordance with Piaget, considers that from the time of their birth, children learn independently by exploring their environment. Curiously and in agreement with Behaviourism, he believes that adults are responsible for shaping children’s learning by the judicious use of rewards or comments, as well as routines. But most importantly and going to the heart of the matter, Vygotsky thinks that children are born into a social world and that because of that, learning occurs through interaction with other people: we make our own sense of the world. Here comes the importance of language in this process of learning. Through language and through the interaction resulting from its use culture is transmitted, thinking develops and learning occurs. And for effective learning to truly happen, that interaction must occur between people with different levels of, in our case, communicative competence. In other words, the one who is in a higher level, together with a mediator (the teacher for instance, because he/she is a sort of “significant other”, someone who selects and shapes learning experiences) is going to help the other one to move to the following layer of knowledge, that is to advance in his/ her Zone of Proximal Development or layer of knowledge which is a bit beyond what he/ she can solve alone.
It is clearly seen that for this social-interactionism trend, the emphasis lies on the interaction, the relation between the teacher (norm), the learner (with his/her level of interlanguage development) and the task (challenge), creating the appropriate context for education, defining it as the combination of instruction, learning to learn, developing strategies and skills and the presence of meaningful experiences; all this to educate the whole person.On his behalf, Bruner recognizes that there exits a capacity, biological in origin –LAD- in every human being that predisposes him to use language for communication, but at the same time, that human competence is a hundred per cent cultural in the means by which it finds expression, that is, we need to interact with others, to exercise our innate capacity for communicating ideas. So language, which is made up of phonology, syntax, semantic and illocutionary acts, comes to be a means for interpreting and regulating culture. This starts the moment the infant enters the human scene, in accordance with Vygotsky. Bruner thinks that any pre-linguistic infant is predisposed to acquire culture through language. How? Through good-directed activities which imply actions, activities which are familiar to him, activities which demand a format. In these activities, the role the adults play is paramount for Bruner. The adult is going to become a model and a partner fine-tuning language, that is to say, creating a LASS or Language Acquisition Support System, which contains the LAD (Chomsky). Through this LASS, the adult is going to “scaffold” the child till the moment he or she can solve the problem aloneGames are of great importance in these two theories due to the fact that: they have got a format to follow, to comprehend, children follow a routine, they require the exchange of language, they are end-oriented, moral develops through them, there are turn-takings, among other things. http://www.slideshare.net/maeugenia8/our-curriculum-design