ABSTRACT
Converging research from anthropology, applied linguistics, psychology, and education has taken up the term sociocultural, often using it with slightly different meanings and sometimes with very different applications. At its core, however, the epistemological stance of a sociocultural perspective defines human learning as a dynamic social activity that is situated in physical and social contexts, and is distributed across persons, tools, and activities (Rogoff, 2003; Salomon, 1993; Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1991). This is significant because, unlike behavioral or cognitive theories of human learning, a sociocultural perspective argues that higherlevel human cognition in the individual has its origins in social life. That is, instead of assuming that there are universal features of human cognition that can be separated from the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which they emerged and are used, a sociocultural perspective focuses on sociocultural activities as the essential processes through which human cognition is formed. Ultimately, a sociocultural perspective seeks “to explicate the relationship between human mental functioning, on the one hand, and the cultural, institutional, and historical situations in which this functioning occurs, on the other” (Wertsch, 1995, p. 3).
