Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotsky worked in the 1920s and 1930s, and devoted a large portion of his book “Thought and Speech” (Vygotsky, 1986) to the experimental work carried out by him and his colleagues, its purpose being to investigate the development of concepts in school-age children.

This article looks at the implications of Vygotsky’s theory on concept development in bilingual students, sometimes also referred to as English-as-a-second-language ( ESL) learners. This article attempts to provide a description of the processes involved in concept development and to explore the challenges that bilingual students face in acquiring scientific knowledge.

This issue is of great importance and interest for those who are concerned with cognitive and psychological development of bilingual students, including administrators, teachers, and parents. Understanding of the processes of concept development as they are related to school-age bilingual speakers may also shed some light on general issues of L1 and L2 acquisition.

Vygotsky’s drew an analogy between the processes of acquiring first and second languages and acquiring everyday and scientific concepts. He also wondered about the relationships between school instruction and knowledge acquisition, and the processes of internal development of scientific concepts in the minds of schoolchildren, “The child's thought is non-deliberate and uncon­scious of itself. How, then, does the child eventually reach awareness and mastery of his own thoughts?” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 163)

Vygotsky continuously emphasized the important role of education/instruction for maturity of children’s thought processes in general and the development of their conceptual system in particular. He considered instruction at school age to be the decisive moment which determines the entire fate of the mental development of a child, including the development of his concepts. Vygotsky saw the problem of non-spontaneous concepts, including scientific, as the problem of instruction and development.

At the same time, he emphasized the nonidentity of development and instruction. Instruction serves as the source of development. It is not possible for some mental functions to arise without instruction:

The school years as a whole are the optimal period for instruction in operations that require awareness and deliberate control; instruction in these operations maxi­mally furthers the development of the higher psychologi­cal functions while they are maturing. This applies also to the development of the scientific concepts to which school instruction introduces the child. (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 190)

Vygotsky stressed the importance of creating and implementing corresponding programs in educational processes that would have their purpose to assist the development of scientific concepts: “Analysis of the data showed that as long as the curriculum supplies the necessary material, the development of scientific concepts runs ahead of the development of spontaneous concepts …” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 190)

Through instructional activities, a teacher can find ways to connect students’ everyday knowledge with academic knowledge of schools and thus bring both their spontaneous and scientific concept development to a more advanced point. This issue is particularly critical for bilingual students. Hedegaard (1998) asserts that, “the relation between subject-matter concepts and personal concepts is often much weaker for immigrants and refugees coming to a new country than for children with generations of ancestors in a society” (p. 114). She conducted a study with Puerto Rican children in New York City and noticed that subject-matter knowledge was based on students’ everyday knowledge and activities, and at the same time the everyday knowledge was influenced by the development of scientific concepts in the way that it was brought to more complex levels.

John-Steiner et al. (1998) examined the systematicity of concept formation and used a functional systems approach to analyze the connection between scientific and everyday concepts. According to these scholars, “this approach accounts for the varying conditions under which humans acquire systematic concepts and the ways they relate them to both their everyday experiences and the sociocultural practices of their communities” (p. 128).

Vygotsky argued that the question of the development of scientific concepts in school-age children is the most important practical question that schools face in regard to educating a child in the system of scientific knowledge. This question is an important one for modern schools too, with the advent of NCLB testing. We need to ask ourselves: Does test-oriented instruction help students to develop cognitively and psychologically? Another important question is: What difference does it make for ESL students if they are taught content areas in English, a language they do not fully understand? [Return to top]