Social interactionist theory

Social interactionist theory is an explanation of language development emphasizing the role of social interaction between the developing child and linguistically knowledgeable adults. It is based largely on the socio-cultural theories of Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky.

Approach to language acquisition research has focused on three areas, namely the cognitive approach to language acquisition or the developmental cognitive theory of Jean Piaget, the information processing approach or the information processing model of Brian MacWhinney and Elizabeth Bates (the competition model), and the social interactionist approach or social interaction model of Lev Vygotsky (socio-cultural theory). Although the initial research was essentially descriptive in an attempt to describe language development from the stand point of social development, more recently, researchers have been attempting to explain a few varieties of acquisition in which learner factors lead to differential acquisition by the process of socialization; called the theory of “social interactionist approach”.

Vygotsky, a psychologist and social constructivist, laid the foundation for the interactionists view of language acquisition. According to Vygotsky, social interaction plays an important role in the learning process and proposed the zone of proximal development (ZPD) where learners construct the new language through socially mediated interaction. Vygotsky's social-development theory was adopted and made prominent in the Western world though by Jerome Bruner who laid the foundations of a model of language development in the context of adult-child interaction.

In contrast to the theoretical positions of behaviourism, the approach to language acquisition emphasizing that children are conditioned to learn language by a stimulus-response pattern with which it is sometimes confused, the social interactionist approaches rests on the premises of a social-cognitive model, emphasizing the child's construction of a social world which then serves as the context of language development.

It levels an outline of a language acquisition theory in combining of both the traditional behavioral and linguistic position in language production; the essentials of this theory, which differentiate it from a semantically based theory, are that the deepest level of representation specifies the communicative intent primarily and semantic content secondarily. Thus, within this theory the language acquisition can easily be realized differently in emphasizing the role of the environment in producing such differences, as is most often the case in child language and not infrequently the case in adult language. It is incumbent on this model as on any serious attempt to provide a theory of language acquisition, to answer questions about how the model accounts for changes in the child's knowledge with development, and how the model can account for the adult's language system.

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