ABSTRACT
Vygotsky’s influence in establishing sociocultural theory is widely recognized; however, his methodological approach, which provides the foundation for his theoretical framework, has not received the attention that it deserves, resulting in widely divergent interpretations of his work. For his methodological approach, Vygotsky used Marx and Engels’ approach and applied it to analyze the origins and development of human consciousness. Vygotsky viewed the brain and mind as having unique defining characteristics but at the same time forming an inextricable unity. He focused on a fundamental factor in the formation of human consciousness, the unification of previously distinct languaging and thinking processes at the time that children begin using symbolic representation to communicate meaning. The analysis of the entity created by this unity, Rechevóye Mishlénie (a thinking/languaging system), makes up much of Vygotsky’s major work Thinking and Speech (1987) in which he derived a unit that was primary, irreducible and yet maintained the essence of the whole being analysed—Rechevóye Mishlénie. This unit, znachenie slova (the internal structure of the sign operation), has been translated as “word meaning” resulting in a focus on the external meaning of words rather than the internal system that was the object of Vygotsky’s investigation.
