Introduction

In the initial sociocultural theory (SCT) timeline, Lantolf and Beckett (Reference Lantolf and Beckett2009) surveyed a broad spectrum of research informed by sociocultural psychology as it was extended into the field of second language acquisition and language teaching. Since that time, the amount of research that has been published within the SCT framework has grown exponentially. With regard to the educational setting, two major strands of research have emerged; one that addresses pedagogical practice and the other that deals with assessment. The assessment strand, Dynamic Assessment, adheres to principles that emerge from the SCT concept of the Zone of Proximal Development and is the topic of a separate timeline (see Poehner & Wang, Reference Poehner and Wangforthcoming). The pedagogical strand, the topic of the present article, is generally referred to as Concept-based Language Instruction (C-BLI), although in some publications the rubric Concept-based Instruction (CBI) is used. Unfortunately, the abbreviation of the alternative rubric has on more than one occasion been confused with content-based instruction, also abbreviated as CBI. We would like to suggest here that it would be better if SCT researchers were to adopt C-BLI to avoid misinterpretations going forward.

C-BLI is a systematic approach to language instruction grounded in principles of SCT as laid down by Vygotsky (Reference Vygotsky, Rieber and Carton1987, Reference Vygotsky, Rieber and Wollock1997) and refined by later generations of SCT researchers, including most importantly Gal'perin (Reference Gal'perin1979, Reference Gal'perin1992) and Davydov (Reference Davydov2004). Gal'perin, whose pedagogical framework is known as Systemic Theoretical Instruction (STI), has been particularly influential in establishing the procedures used in C-BLI. Gal'perin's approach to educational development is clearly explained in Haenen (Reference Haenen1996, Reference Haenen2001). The extensive research program conducted by Gal'perin and his colleagues in an array of school subjects, including language instruction, is summarized in a book by Talyzina (Reference Talyzina1981). The motivation for coining C-BLI instead of adopting Gal'perin's rubric STI is because the all-important systematic knowledge which forms the foundation of the approach is drawn from meaning-based rather than structure-based theories of language, as was the case in early instantiations of the Gal'perin's model (e.g., Carpay, Reference Carpay1974; Kabanova, Reference Kabanova1985). To date the majority of C-BLI research has focused on grammatical meaning and pragmatics. Van Compernolle (2014)* suggested a variation of C-BLI in order to reflect specific focus on pragmatics: Concept-Based Pragmatics Instructions (C-BPI), which we adopt in the current article. Given its concern with meaning rather than structure per se, C-BLI research has by and large allied itself with meaning-based theories of language, including most especially cognitive linguistics (see Lantolf, 2011*) and to a lesser extent, systemic functional linguistics, especially when focus is on text production and comprehension (e.g., Buescher, 2015*; Ferreira, Reference Ferreira2005).

Before presenting the timeline, we believe it will be beneficial to provide the reader with some background on the general set of procedures that have been developed to implement C-BLI in the educational setting. To fully appreciate the significance of the developmental theory underlying C-BLI, we first need to understand that Vygotsky distinguished two types of development based on the nature of conceptual (i.e., meaning-based) knowledge at work in everyday and educational practices. In everyday life, knowledge is by and large derived from highly contextualized concrete experiences and observations of reality. In the case of children, these are generally organized and guided by adults, who themselves have been shaped by the beliefs, meanings (primarily language-based), and activities of their respective cultures. For example, our everyday direct experience of the heavens (generally reinforced by our language) leads us to conclude that the sun moves and the earth remains stable. Our understanding of geometric shapes, such as ‘circle’, is derived from our encounters with specific objects with an appropriate physical configuration—coins, wheels, rings, etc.—and from the fact that others tell us that these particular objects are circular in shape. Our everyday categorization of fruits and vegetables puts tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and corn in the same food group as lettuce, spinach, asparagus, and beans, and sends us to the vegetable section of markets to purchase such items. Rigorous scientific observation of the heavens, on the other hand, tells us that it is the earth that moves around a stable sun. Scientifically, all circles that have ever existed or that will ever exist are figures generated by one point rotating around another fixed point (e.g., the geometers compass), and botanical science categorizes tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and corn with apples, peaches, and pears as fruit.

According to Egan (Reference Egan2002), for more than a century and a half educators have tried to improve educational practice by replicating in school the discovery processes that operate when children learn in everyday life. In his view, however, the hunt for the so-called ‘natural child’, taken up by the likes of Spencer, Dewey, and Piaget, and concretized in practices such as inquiry-based, or discovery, learning (e.g., Wells, Reference Wells1999), has been a futile enterprise. For one thing, trial-and-error learning is fairly inefficient, especially under the time constraints at work in educational settings, and for another, it can result in inappropriate or superficial conclusions. As Karpov (Reference Karpov, Kozulin, Gindis, Ageyev and Miller2003, p. 71) cautions, discovery learning ‘may work if the common salient characteristics of objects or events reflect their significant, essential characteristics’, but it runs into problems when the observable common features of a set of objects are not the essential features of the entire class of objects under consideration, as in the botanical example illustrated in the preceding paragraph.

In our own field, Krashen's (Krashen & Terrell, Reference Krashen and Terrell2000) assertions about the value of comprehensible input for language acquisition and his admonishments against explicit instruction are also predicated on the ‘natural child’ orientation and on the subsequent assumptions that for adults to be effective language learners they must adhere to the same procedures that children follow, despite the fact that adults have different kinds of minds from children and can learn in ways that are at variance with the primary way children learn (see Paradis, Reference Paradis2009; Arievitch, Reference Arievitch2017). Vygotsky vigorously opposed replicating natural ways of learning in the educational environment and asserted that if school development replicated everyday development it would be an unnecessary activity. The point of education is to build on, and eventually restructure through access to scientific knowledge, what we learn through everyday spontaneous experiences.

Although Vygotsky did not offer a specific blueprint for how to promote educational development, he was quite clear that educational practice must provide an experience that is different from the developmental experiences of everyday life. Accordingly, he argued that formal education entails the ‘artificial development’ of the individual (Vygotsky, Reference Vygotsky, Rieber and Wollock1997, p. 88). By artificial he did not mean ‘fake’ or ‘unreal’, but planned and systematic access to rigorously formulated knowledge that ‘restructures all functions of behavior in a most essential manner’ (p. 88). For Vygotsky, education is a dialectical process captured in the Russian term obuchenie ‘teaching-learning’ (Cole, Reference Cole2009), in which instruction opens the way for, and promotes, development instead of waiting for learners to somehow become developmentally receptive to instruction as proposed by Piaget. In second language (L2) teaching the readiness model has had considerable, and in our view, deleterious, influence through such theories as Pienemann's (Reference Pienemann1998) processability theory and affiliated teachability hypothesis (Pienemann, Reference Pienemann1989) as well as Krashen's (Krashen & Terrell, Reference Krashen and Terrell2000) notion of comprehensible input.

The focal component of educational development for Vygotsky (Reference Vygotsky, Rieber and Carton1987) is the unit of instruction—the scientific concept, which mediates the teaching-learning dialectic (i.e., obuchenie). Scientific concepts are ‘generalizations of the experience of humankind that are fixed in science, understood in the broadest sense of the term to include both natural and social science as well as the humanities’ (Karpov, Reference Karpov, Kozulin, Gindis, Ageyev and Miller2003, p. 71). Unlike everyday concepts, which tend to be ‘isolated, ossified and changeless formations’ (Vygotsky, Reference Vygotsky, Rieber and Carton1987, p. 98) and as such enjoy a limited range of functionality across contexts, scientific concepts are generalizations that can be expected to operate much more flexibly and in a wider domain and therefore form ‘an active part of the intellectual process, constantly engaged in serving communication, understanding, and problem solving’ (Vygotsky, Reference Vygotsky, Rieber and Carton1987, p. 99). The challenge for educators is to develop effective means to capture and present the concepts in a way that is understandable, memorable, and functional for learners (Karpov, Reference Karpov, Kozulin, Gindis, Ageyev and Miller2003, p. 71).

To appreciate the distinction between language-based scientific concepts and traditional approaches to explaining features of a target, consider first how the vocative pronoun system in a language such as French, Spanish, or German is described in many textbooks. Learners are informed that speakers of these languages indicate the status of the relationship between speakers through the use of specific pronoun forms. Thus, in a language such as French, the pronoun tu (you) is used when the relationship is informal, such as when speaking to people who have a close relationship such as family members, colleagues, friends, God as well as when interacting on the internet, while the pronoun vous is used between strangers (e.g., people on the street, salespeople in shops, by a younger speaker to an older speaker, and always when addressing a group of individuals). This type of description is frequently referred to as a rule of thumb; as such it is not necessarily inaccurate, because it could be that people with a close relationship would address each other with tu whereas strangers would likely use vous. The shortcoming of these types of ‘rule’, however, is that they fail to capture the complexities and subtleties entailed in social relationships. For instance, in German, it is much more likely that colleagues will address each other using Sie (formal) than du (informal), and in certain regions of Spain (e.g., Barcelona) tu is often used in public interactions with older interlocutors to avoid highlighting age differences.

Van Compernolle, in several of his publications on C-PBI, observed that speakers of languages such as French do not follow ‘rules’ when deciding which address forms to use, but instead make their decisions based on orders of indexicality, a concept formulated by Silverstein (Reference Silverstein2003). Van Compernolle (Reference van Compernolle2012), recognizing that learners are unlikely to possess the technical expertise necessary to engage with Silverstein's exposé of the concept, adapted it for his audience of learners. Accordingly, he explained indexicality as language use based on a speaker's perception of geographic location, formal nature of context, speaker age, education level, social class, and group membership (i.e., first-order indexicality); a desire to sound or not sound, local, older or younger, more or less educated, higher or lower class, group or non-group member (i.e., second-order indexicality); orientation to speech traits such as regional accents, slang, and stereotypes of age, education, class, and language use (i.e., third-order indexicality). The three orders of indexicality were then visualized as five interrelated Schemas for the Orienting Basis of Action (SCOBAs).

As outlined below, C-BLI pedagogy integrates the six phases of Gal'perin's STI model. For a full discussion of C-BLI, including its underlying theory, along with reviews of several pedagogical and experimental projects informed by the approach, the interested reader should consult the book-length publication by Lantolf and Poehner (Reference Lantolf and Poehner2014).

With the preceding background in mind, we present the timeline that surveys and summarizes a decade of C-BLI research. Most of the research has addressed language instruction-learning (obuchenie) either in real classrooms or in what we will call clinical settings, which for our purposes means studies which recruit volunteers to participate in instruction outside of the normal context of a classroom, and frequently include a smaller number of students (1–10) than normally enlist in typical courses. In addition, a new area of research has also opened up with a focus on integration of C-BLI in teacher education, including both pre-service and in-service programs.