Vygotskyan Approaches to Understanding Foreign Language Learner Discourse during Communicative Tasks

This article presents and analyzes speech data from secondary-level learners of Spanish who are engaged in a problem-solving speaking task commonly used in classrooms and in research. It applies a Vygotskyan perspective to understand the nature of selected aspects of their speech activity, such as talk about the task, talk about the talk, and the use of English. The findings suggest that encoding-decoding perspectives, prevalent in much second language research on learner-to-learner speech activity, are inappropriate for capturing and understanding what these learners are attempting to accomplish during their face-to-face activity. In other words, not all speech activity between classroom learners during classroom communicative tasks is necessarily communicative in intent.