What might teachers find useful in Vygotsky’s ideas about language and learning?
Vygotsky regarded language as a cultural tool that involves dialogue with others. He argued that children free themselves through speech from the immediate constraints of their environment. In the earliest stages of children’s growth (below three years of age) he asserted that speech is entirely communicative and not related to thinking. However, from the age of three onwards he thought that new functions of speech emerge alongside the communicative function. Vygotsky identified three elements: • during the ages of three to seven years children think out loud, talk to themselves when doing tasks and manipulate numbers out loud • over the same period most children increasingly use speech to plan and control their behaviour and that of others. Their speech develops in relation to their own actions and purposes • from about seven years onwards children’s speech, as related to thinking and planning, usually becomes internalised, the processes they described out loud in an early phase have
