ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of Vygotsky's theoretical contribution to the field. The concepts developed by Vygotsky sometimes appear as a web of tightly related notions. Vygotsky conveys of social, cultural and historical influences on individual development. The internalization model of cultural development, emphasizing transformation of social functions into individual skills, leads to a chain of mutually related dualisms between oppositional abstractions such as the social and the individual, the external and the internal, and the environment and the organism. Vygotsky shaped and gave the major impetus for the internalization model of development. Schneuwly discusses Vygotsky's theory of development in terms of the individual's reorganisation of lower psychological functions to form new higher ones whilst emphasising that psychological functions are themselves historical-cultural constructions. He views the concept of zone of proximal development (ZPD) as the theoretical attempt to understand the operation of contradiction between internal possibilities and external needs that constitutes the driving force of development.
