J. P. Lantolf and S. L. Thorne: Sociocultural Theory and The Genesis of Second Language Development. Oxford University Press, 2006.

Since Firth and Wagner's (1997) seminal article which called for a social turn in SLA, there has been a proliferation of SLA research that has embraced sociocultural perspectives. Admittedly, such perspectives had been around even before the so-called Firth and Wagner debate, with Zuengler and Miller (2006) identifying five such perspectives in their position paper on SLA theory. One key perspective has been Vygotskian sociocultural theory (SCT). In fact, SCT guides this book. It seeks ‘to describe the history and continuing development of Vygotsky-inspired research and its application to second- and foreign-language developmental processes and pedagogies’ (p. 1). In keeping with SCT tradition, the environment is not seen as a resource, but as the source of development, with communicative activity playing a central role in such development. Working from this platform, the authors put forward a Linguistics of Communicative Activity framework in Chapter 1 which reframes language teaching and learning not as ‘rule-governed grammar systems that must be acquired but [as] enhancing learners’ communicative resources that are formed and reformed in the very activity in which they are used’ (p. 7). This framework attempts, they argue, to bring meaning back to its proper place alongside form, and views language through a dialogic lens. In other words, language is seen to have an emergent quality which, according to the authors, closely parallels Vygotsky's transformative interpretation of higher order thinking (p. 15).