ABSTRACT
This chapter articulates the pivotal and complicated role of mediation in the development of higher mental processes, especially in terms of L2 teacher development. Beginning with Vygotsky, the chapter shows how mediation is conceptualized within a sociocultural theoretical perspective. The chapter also explains how various Vygotskian scholars have interpreted mediation and extended it for psychological and educational applications. It offers responsive mediation as playing a crucial role in exploiting the potential of what Vygotsky called symbolic tools social interaction, and concepts to enable teachers to appropriate them as psychological tools in learning-to-teach and in directing their teaching activity. Vygotsky's innovation is that he conceptually framed the distance between a learner's level of independent performance and the level of assisted performance as the zone of proximal development (ZPD). In essence, dynamic assessment (DA) is a procedure for simultaneously assessing and promoting development that takes account of the individual's zone of proximal development.
