A Bakhtinian Understanding of Social Constructivism in Language Teaching

It is generally accepted that there is not a single school of thought that is called social constructivism, and ideas and assumptions from various disciplines in different fields are being incorporated into the social constructivist understanding. In this paper, a Bakhtinian perspective of social constructivism on education and language learning is discussed and studies that have explored Bakhtinian concepts in education have been reviewed. It is recommended that examining the structure of social interaction in the classroom based on the Bakhtinian concepts discussed (i.e., dialogism, monologism, recitation) can help us see the classrooms from a different perspective and provide insights that are not available from other perspectives.