Abstract

Written by Li Li, Language Teacher Cognition: A Sociocultural Perspective, as the title indicates, explores the topic of teacher cognition from the perspective of sociocultural theory, aiming to theorize and analyze what teachers think, believe, know and do in their professional contexts through the lens of social interaction and Vygotsky’s theory of mental development. This book was published in October 2019 as an extension and expansion of the author’s previous book Social Interaction and Teacher Cognition (2017), answering Johnson’s (2009) call for a social turn for teacher cognition stressing the importance of teacher learning in communities, and how their experiences can help them develop professional thinking and understanding (Li, 2020). This book consists of nine chapters. The first chapter provides readers with a brief review of language teacher cognition research, lays out the theoretical underpinning for this book, i.e. the combination of sociocultural theory (SCT), discursive psychology (DP) and conversation analysis (CA), and illustrates the significance of this book and its intended readers. The second chapter discusses the significance of language teacher cognition research and its many different theoretical understandings and research methods, offering a profound and new understanding of the key concepts of SCT, i.e. mediation, ZPD (zone of proximal development) and internalization. The third chapter elaborates on the link between teacher cognition and soci...