The Undiscovered Vygotsky in Prabhu

Abstract

The ideas of Prabhu and Vygotsky have endured in our intellectual landscape for the last forty years. Having drawn from both of them in various language programmes in South Africa, we are intrigued by the thought of finding convergences and divergences in these two scholars, so separated in time, context and geography. What further compels us to explore this possibility are Prabhu’s brief but beguiling references in his books (1987 and 2019a) to Vygotsky’s work. Prabhu’s The Learner’s Effort in the Language Classroom in his second book helped us examine Vygotsky’s thoughts on first- and second-language learning, spontaneous and scientific concepts, oracy and literacy, and his profoundly influential ideas of the Zone of Proximal Development and Mediation. We explore how these ideas relate to Prabhu’s work in the Bangalore Project (1979–1984). We also comment briefly on the work of Second-Language Acquisition researchers, who use both Prabhu and Vygotsky’s ideas in ways quite removed from their original perceptions. We also offer a piece of classroom data from the African Language Group (ALG) Project, in which we applied a task-based pedagogy (the ‘strong version’ of Communicative Language Teaching) to Zulu, and also an example of a problem-solving task.

Appendix

The projects in which we used Prabhu and Vygotsky’s ideas are listed below:

• 1. The Communicational Teaching of Adults Project (CTAP): Johannesburg, February-November 1995 (voluntary teaching of English to 25–30 predominantly Zulu-speaking adult learners, aged 22–60, mostly domestic and industrial workers, two-hour sessions two evenings a week, totally 120 h of teaching). In this adult literacy project, we replicated NS Prabhu’s Communicational Teaching Project, using task-based materials, predominantly reasoning-gap activities, on adult themes such as shopping, bus and class timetables, bank rules, home loan applications and maps. Comics and stories, of interest to adults, provided for the acquisition of English through meaningful engagement with extended texts.

• 2. BA Honours in Applied English Language Studies: Wits University, Johannesburg, 1992–1997: a unit on Prabhu’s ideas and the Communicational Teaching Project in the English Methodology module, including demonstrations of task-based teaching.

• 3. The African Language Group (ALG) Project: Johannesburg, October-1995 to mid-1997: training by MJ and ER of three Zulu-speaking teachers in the CTP methodology to teach Zulu to 30 largely white English-speaking monolinguals and English-Afrikaans bilinguals. Almost all of these adult learners were themselves language and literacy teachers, applied linguists, university academics and practitioners in Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). About half of them had tried to learn Zulu before but had very little competence in using Zulu and found earlier grammar and conversation-based courses too difficult, impoverished and demotivating.

A weekly one-hour training session for the Zulu teachers was used to plan tasks, view videos of previous lessons, look at the feedback sheets that learners filled in at every lesson, and sort out any difficulties that the teachers had. The actual lessons took place in one two-hour session per week, totalling about 75 lessons in all. Every eighth lesson was a reflective workshop, in which teachers, trainers and learners clarify issues of methodology, suggest new themes for tasks, express disagreement or scepticism. Learners were also keen to have cassette recordings of texts and dialogues, but the teachers always included tasks based on these texts. In the ALG Project, both of us (ER and MJ) were trainers, learners and researchers, giving us new perspectives on what it means to learn a totally new language (Zulu) through a task-based approach as well as training teachers in the methodology of task-based teaching for a language we do not know.

At this time, 25 years later, we do not have access to any videos we made of the lessons, but we did come across a transcript of a lesson taught during the early days of the project. It is not a typical lesson, but illustrates very well, some of the principles of our project,

Some of these will be discussed in the analysis of this transcript given below.

Turn	Speaker/actor	Utterance/action	English translation
1	T	Anthony, thatha igedlela ulibeke kutafula Anthony, thatha igedlela ulibeke kutafula	Anthony, take the kettle and put it on the table (T repeats this instruction)
2	L1	Anthony takes the kettle and puts it on the table
3	T	Ngiyabonga. Igedlela. Carol, bhala igedlela. Igedlela	Thank you. Igedlela. Carol. Write igedlela. Igedlela
4	L2	Carol comes to the board. Please repeat
5	T	I-ge-dle-la
6	L2	Carol writes ‘ikedlela’
7	T	Ubhale kahle?	Has she written it correctly?
8	LL (chorus)	Yebo!	Yes!
9	T	Yebo?	Yes?
10	L3	Cha!	No!
11	T	Woza. Lungisa, Graham	Come. Correct it, Graham
12	LL (chorus)	Woza!
13	L3	Graham comes to the board, erases ‘dl’ and writes ‘tl’
14	T	Ubhale kahle, uGraham. Peter, ubhale kahle?	Has Graham written it correctly? Peter, has he written it correctly?
15	LL (chorus)	Cha! Cha!	No! No!
16	T	Lungisa, lungisa!	Correct it! Correct it!
17	LL (chorus)	Lungisa, lungisa!	Correct it! Correct it!
18	T	Yebo, lungisa!	Yes, correct it!
19	L4	Peter comes to the board, erases ‘tl’ and writes ‘hl’
20	T	Ubhale kahle, uPeter?	Has Peter written it correctly?
21	LL (chorus)	Yebo! Yebo!	Yes! Yes!
22	L4	I think so
23	T	Awu, iketlela, hayi! (Laughs) IsiSotho lesi, la eklasini isikhuluma isiZulu, hayi isiSotho iketlela. Bhala isiZulu, i- ge-dle- la (Stresses each syllable) Lungisa, Esther	Oh no, iketlela, no! (Laughs) That is Sotho, in this class we are speaking Zulu, not Sotho iketlela. Write in Zulu, i-ge-dle-la (Stresses each syllable). Correct it, Esther
24	L5	Esther comes to the board and writes ‘ikedlela’
25	T	uCarol ubhale kahle la (pointing to the board). Kuhle, kodwa kunegama elilodwa eliy one elingekho right. Kuhle, kodwa kunegama elilodwa eliy one elingekho right. Ubani? Igedlela, igedlela	Carol has already written that (pointing to the board). Okay, except for one letter, it is right Okay, except for one letter, it is right. Who? Igedlela, igedlela
26	LL (chorus)	Igedlela!
27	T	Yebo, wozolungisa, Sarah	Yes, come correct it, Sarah
28	L6	Is this still wrong?
29	L6	Sarah comes to the board, erases ‘k’ and writes ‘g’
30	T	Yebo, ubhale kahle manje. Igedlela	Yes, she has written it correctly now. Igedlela
31	LL	(not clear)
32	T	Nge-English igedlela yini?	In English what is igedlela?
33	LL (chorus)	Kettle, kettle!
34	T	Yebo!	Yes!

Analysis of this transcript

We comment here on only some significant aspects of this interaction. All of the learners (including us, ER and MJ) were quite unexpectedly preoccupied with writing in Zulu (both requesting the teachers to write their oral instructions on the board, and ourselves writing these instructions in our notebooks). We realized that this was actually a strategy to facilitate comprehension: when listening to a new language, we have no clue about where words end and new ones begin! By seeing the word boundaries in Zulu, we could work out the meanings of words and their relation to each other! This way of arriving at meaning, by making the teacher’s instructions permanent through writing (and something we could look at later at home) seemed to be very successful. The problem with this approach was that as learners we got very preoccupied with the spellings of words and their pronunciation, but as adult literate learners, we realized that literacy played a crucial role in our comprehension of oral instructions.

The teacher, in this lesson, decided quite spontaneously, to engage the learners in a spelling task but to conduct (as was the principle in the ALG Project) the entire interaction in Zulu. It can be seen from the 34 turns in this interaction, that it was not easy. We learners spelt the word igedlela as we heard it, and through a process of trial and error, involving six different learners, finally arrived at the correct spelling.

While it may be tempting to view this as a ‘form-focused’ interaction, in the sense that the task had to do with working out a sound-symbol correlation, it involved an effort to understand the teacher’s instructions and carry them out at the board. Each error made by a learner led to us working out through elimination and inference, what the right spelling could be. This is what made it a problem-solving task.

Other aspects worth commenting on are the spontaneous use of much classroom management talk by the learners in Zulu: yebo (yes), cha (no), woza (come), lungisa (correct), the use of English by L6 at turn 28 and the teacher’s unfailing use of Zulu and only Zulu.

In contrast to the simplicity of this early lesson, given below is a task sheet from a lesson a year later. Learners were given a real-life newspaper advertisement in English for the sale of houses (such material being unavailable in Zulu at the time) and were required to respond to written questions in Zulu. Thners oere was NO expectation that the answers had to be in complete sentences, as the aim of the task was for the learners to make an effort to comprehend the questions.

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Umsebenzi Obhalwayo (Written work) English translations were NOT provided in the original task sheet

• i. Zingakhi izindlu ezithengiswayo kule-advert? (How many houses are for sale in this advert)?

• ii. Ngezayiphi inkampani lezizindlu ezithengiswayo? (Which company is selling these houses)?

• iii. Iyiphi indlu oyibona ishibhe ukudlula ezinye? (Which house is the cheapest)?

• iv. Iyiphi indlu ohamba ibanga elincane uma uya esitolo? (Which house is close to the shops)?

• v. Uma ufuna ukuthenga iTownHouse ungashayela bani ucingo? (if you want to buy a townhouse who can you call)?

• 4. The Northern Sotho Language Project (NSLP): University of Limpopo, January–November 1999. When we moved to the University of Limpopo, we replicated the ALG Project using Northern Sotho (officially now called Sesotho sa Leboa), a dominant language of the Northern (now Limpopo) Province. Again we trained three Masters students to teach Northern Sotho to a group of 15 academic staff, mostly white, but also a couple of academics from other African countries. Many of the ALG materials were translated from Zulu to Northern Sotho, and once again, a task-based approach was used.

• 5. BA Honours in English Studies: University of Limpopo, 1998–2002, a unit on Prabhu’s ideas and the Communicational Teaching Project in the English Methods module, including demonstrations of task-based teaching.

• 6. BA in Contemporary English and Multilingual Studies (BA CEMS): University of Limpopo, 2003 to date. This was the first time we taught Vygotsky’s ideas in a third-year module on Language and Cognition in a three-year dual-medium undergraduate degree (taught through both English and Northern Sotho).

• 7. Biliteracy research project at school level: CM Vellem School, Joza, Makhanda (Grahamstown) 2014–2019. This was a collaborative, community engagement project in which we worked closely with a primary school teacher developing task-based materials in both English and Xhosa (the dominant language of the Eastern Cape). This primary school teacher-cum-researcher, Nompumelelo Frans, went on to complete her MA studies, drawing on both Vygotsky’s and Prabhu’s work, at Rhodes University, under our supervision.