Second language learning as a mediated process

This article reviews the research carried out over approximately the past five years on second language learning as a mediated process. Lantolf and Pavlenko (1995) surveyed twenty-five studies carried out from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s on mediated second language (L2) learning. Since the publication of their article only five years ago, more than forty new studies have appeared on mediated learning. As this research has become more robust, it has explored some of the original topics in greater depth and importantly, it has moved into new areas not previously studied. For example, current work continues to seek to better understand how L2 learning is mediated in the Zone of Proximal Development, a topic of earlier work, but it is now looking more closely at peer rather than expert-novice scaffolding in the ZPD. Research is also studying how experts scaffold novices in concrete classroom situations where concern is not with the ZPD itself, as was the case with the original work, but with how individuals, unaware of such a construct, go about providing and appropriating help in order to learn.While some of the earlier research focused on the role of private speech in carrying out tasks in a second language, more recent research is concerned with the role of private speech in appropriating a second language. A new area of interest that has opened up within the past two or three years deals with the processes through which language mediates the formation of new identities among L2 learners.