The social environment of the classroom: A Vygotskian perspective on small group process

Abstract

Many Language Arts educators have argued that teacher‐led discussions of literature limit students' participation and focus their attention on the teacher's agenda rather than enabling them to construct meaning for themselves. Alternative classroom structures, such as small group discussions, have been proposed to empower students in literary analysis and to invest them in classroom discourse. However, researchers have conducted little systematic study of small group process to substantiate them as an alternative. Vygotsky's theory of the social influences on learning provides the framework for an exploratory study of the relationship between patterns of discourse in teacher‐led discussions of literature and in the small group discussions that follow them in an instructional sequence. The data suggest that small groups, when enacted in classrooms in which the teacher's discourse (a) enables students to provide their own broader social and conceptual context for the literature, and (b) explicates analytic strategies, can be a crucial instructional stage in helping students internalize interpretive procedures initially introduced by the teacher. Classrooms in which teachers model interpretive procedures without teaching students how to employ them do not appear to empower students to lead themselves in fruitful discussions.