Cultivating Vygotsky’s buds of development in the education of a Brazilian public school English teacher
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2026.e111951Keywords:
Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory, L2 Teacher Education, Responsive Mediation, Ideal Forms, Buds of DevelopmentAbstract
Grounded in a Vygotskian sociocultural perspective, this paper investigates how a teacher educator intentionally mediated an English teacher’s engagement with ideal forms and how this mediation nurtured her bud of development as she refracted the mediation offered. Data were generated across eight cycles of narrative writing, video-recorded lessons, and synchronous teacher educator-teacher interactions. Findings show how responsive mediation led the teacher to revisit her everyday knowledge, mainly through the scientific concept input, and to develop a more robust understanding of the input-output relationship for English language teaching and learning. Situated within the Brazilian context, where the theory-practice divide prevails, this study draws on VSCT to reconceptualize this gap as a potential site for the professional development of future English language teachers, thereby fostering praxis.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Matheus A. Agnoletto, Karen E. Johnson
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
