ABSTRACT
Sociocultural theories of learning treat social interactions as the crucible in which individuals learn and construct the traditions of their cultural communities (Cole, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 2003; Vygotsky, 1987). Yet, a challenge for research on learning in social contexts is to develop methods to code between-person engagement explicitly. Instead, many studies of social interaction have limited coding to a focus on the isolated behaviors of individuals. For example, studies code the number of questions asked or statements made by an adult, which they relate to separate codes of the number of words spoken or errors made by a child with whom the adult was interacting. The relations among such individual behaviors are examined later statistically or simply speculatively as researchers generate interpretations of the data in their discussion section in an attempt to make sense of isolated ‘variables’ that have been removed from meaningful interpersonal context (Rogoff & Gauvain, 1986). Such coding that breaks down social interaction into a focus on individuals’ acts in isolation from other individuals’ acts does not directly address the dynamic intersubjective aspects of emerging shared meaning and purposes in group interaction. As a consequence, the coding may not actually address a study’s social interactional questions.
