Vygotsky (1962) argued that “to interpret the sinking coefficient of egocentric speech as an indication that this kind of speech is dying out is like saying that the child stops counting when he ceases to use his fingers and starts adding in his head.” (p.135). Discuss and evaluate this proposal using research evidence to support your arguments. (1694)
An increasing amount of theory and research in cognitive development has allowed further reason into the education field, of infamous Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934). Vygotsky focused on the cognitive and social development of a child, concentrating on a child’s speech. Studies found that children use stages of speech to support specific tasks to aid their functioning of language and thought. Vygotsky’s …show more content…
This roots from Vygotsky’s arguments for structural and functional relations between external speech and private speech – Vygotsky saw private speech as a “halfway house” between external speech and inner speech. (Jones 2009).
As mentioned before, Vygotsky accepted Piaget’s view of egocentric speech in children and the dying down of egocentric speech when the child matures. However, Vygotsky differed with his belief that a lack of egocentric speech does not correlate with a child’s lack of ability to be social and communicative. (Kohlberg 1968).
There has been much support in regards to the correlation between task success and egocentric speech. A positive correlation between two variables has been evidenced by Frauenglass and Diaz in 1985. Predictions were derived from Vygotsky’s theory – most importantly it was hypothesized that in solo problem solving tasks, children will have a greater amount of task relevant speech (i.e. egocentric speech) to aid them and that as self-regulatory speech decreases, utterings become frequent, indicating the egocentric speech does not vanish but it is repressed as it forms into inner speech. In this study, children took part it two conditions: firstly, verbal intelligence condition and secondly, a cognitive task. Fraunenglass and Diaz found that the amount of private speech tends …show more content…
Valid criticism of Vygotsky includes studies in the field that have reported occurrences of private speech in only half of the children samples (Fuson 1797). This suggests a lack of generalisability upon the wider population as Vygotsky’s theory can be found invalid as this reduces support for private speech as a universal stage of development whereby language and thought are prominent. Instead, a longitudinal study was suggested to be a more suitable form of experiment to allow gradual changes in problem solving as function of use of language as a tool of thought.
Support for the claim of a lack of participant support, Prior and Welling (2010) conducted a study as they found difficulty in literature for conclusions as participant variation was limited thus creating issues for the developmental model. Issues are formed due to no direct age comparisons to see a change in private speech to inner speech at specific times in life. Prior and Welling conducted a study involving loud and silent reading to mimic private speech and inner speech. It was predicted that children in grade two and three would not have internalized reading thus had higher scores for oral reading and comprehensions, specifically for grade three students. Comprehension scores did no differ for grade four students in addition
An increasing amount of theory and research in cognitive development has allowed further reason into the education field, of infamous Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934). Vygotsky focused on the cognitive and social development of a child, concentrating on a child’s speech. Studies found that children use stages of speech to support specific tasks to aid their functioning of language and thought. Vygotsky’s …show more content…
This roots from Vygotsky’s arguments for structural and functional relations between external speech and private speech – Vygotsky saw private speech as a “halfway house” between external speech and inner speech. (Jones 2009).
As mentioned before, Vygotsky accepted Piaget’s view of egocentric speech in children and the dying down of egocentric speech when the child matures. However, Vygotsky differed with his belief that a lack of egocentric speech does not correlate with a child’s lack of ability to be social and communicative. (Kohlberg 1968).
There has been much support in regards to the correlation between task success and egocentric speech. A positive correlation between two variables has been evidenced by Frauenglass and Diaz in 1985. Predictions were derived from Vygotsky’s theory – most importantly it was hypothesized that in solo problem solving tasks, children will have a greater amount of task relevant speech (i.e. egocentric speech) to aid them and that as self-regulatory speech decreases, utterings become frequent, indicating the egocentric speech does not vanish but it is repressed as it forms into inner speech. In this study, children took part it two conditions: firstly, verbal intelligence condition and secondly, a cognitive task. Fraunenglass and Diaz found that the amount of private speech tends …show more content…
Valid criticism of Vygotsky includes studies in the field that have reported occurrences of private speech in only half of the children samples (Fuson 1797). This suggests a lack of generalisability upon the wider population as Vygotsky’s theory can be found invalid as this reduces support for private speech as a universal stage of development whereby language and thought are prominent. Instead, a longitudinal study was suggested to be a more suitable form of experiment to allow gradual changes in problem solving as function of use of language as a tool of thought.
Support for the claim of a lack of participant support, Prior and Welling (2010) conducted a study as they found difficulty in literature for conclusions as participant variation was limited thus creating issues for the developmental model. Issues are formed due to no direct age comparisons to see a change in private speech to inner speech at specific times in life. Prior and Welling conducted a study involving loud and silent reading to mimic private speech and inner speech. It was predicted that children in grade two and three would not have internalized reading thus had higher scores for oral reading and comprehensions, specifically for grade three students. Comprehension scores did no differ for grade four students in addition