ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Lev Semenovitch Vygotsky's ideas on thought and language; Vygotsky's theory that children develop first as social beings, and then as cognitive ones; Vygotsky's theory that egocentric speech isn't really egocentric; and Vygotsky on how children flourish when helped, and the zone of proximal development. Vygotsky was far less inclined than Jean Piaget to accept the idea of stages in the cognitive development. Vygotsky argued that the child develops as a social creature from the start – and is not egocentric. He suggested four major stages in the development of thought and language: the first three are a 'primitive' stage when speech is pre-intellectual and intelligence is non-verbal, the stage of practical intelligence and the stage of external symbolic representation. The parents are the zone of proximal development, it could be said – and especially in the learning of language.
