Bruner

Bruner 



Social Interactionist theory is t of language development emphasizing social interactions between the child who is developing language and an adult who is linguistically knowledgeable. 

Bruner focused on three areas; the cognitive theory of Jean Piaget, the information processing model of Brian MacWhinney and Elizabeth Bates and the social interactionist approach of Lev Vygotsky. Initially the research was descriptive in an attempt to describe the language development but more recently researchers have attempted to explain more varieties of acqusistion in which the learner learns to socialise towards other people. 

Vygotsky laid the foundations for interactionists view of language acqusistion. According to Vygotsky it plays an important role in learning language he called this the zone of proximal development (ZPD) where the learners construct the new language through social interactions. In contrast the approach to child langauge it emphasizes that language is learned through stimulus response pattern but social interactionist say the emphasis is towards social stimulus to develop child language. 

Essentially social interactionists base an emphasis on the way children interact with adults, and they way the responde to things such as 'good morning'. They believe it is very important to socialise with people otherwise, manners and responses wont be as developed as they have never experienced that type of thing.