I continued my language learning at the teacher training college (Pädagogische Hochschule) in at least one Russian language class a day for six days a week in groups of six students and during the third year abroad in Kaluga, a city 200km south of Moscow, at the Pedagogical Institute there. My other classes in teacher education were
- in phonetics/phonology, morphology, lexicology, syntax, text linguistics, history of the language, for both German and Russian, always in this – structuralist – order, each for one semester,
- in German literature from the Middle Ages to today and Russian and Soviet literature over 300 years, both over a couple of semesters and then literary theory and world literature,
- in general, developmental, and learning psychology all rooted in Soviet Activity Theory (Leontʹev, 1974; Leontʹev & Galperin, 1972; Rubinstein, 1984),
- in the history of pedagogy, general pedagogy, didactics, German (first-language) teaching methodology, Russian (second-language) teaching methodology, teaching methodology of literature, (all also rooted in Activity Theory) teaching observations, teaching practice, and a one-semester teaching internship.
1That kept me busy and mostly out of trouble for five years. Much later I realized that his learning of German grammar and language history – both at school and at university – came in very handy for explaining language constructions to learners of German as a second language. It was even later that I understood that what I had learnt as Activity Theory in psychology and pedagogy at university and from texts by Soviet psychologists like Leontiev and Galperin was also published in the journal Soviet Psychology (1962 to 2022; Published under different journal names in the early and late years by Taylor and Francis (https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/mrpo20). Activity Theory became known as Sociocultural Theory (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006), especially in North America. In Applied Linguistics, Lev Vygotsky, who was born in 1896 and passed away of tuberculosis at the age of 37 in 1934, was and still is quoted in translation and like he is among the living, especially his concept of the zone of proximal development (зона ближайшего развития). I learnt less about Vygotsky, who had fallen out of favor under Stalin, and more about Aleksei N. Leontiev (1903–1979), who was a close collaborator and student of Vygotsky’s and became a prominent figure in Russian psychology, and about his son Aleksei A. Leontiev (1936–2004). In my teacher training, I studied the components of activity systems – with activity being the main unit of analysis – as Leontiev coined them: the (collective) subject (субъект), the (mediating) artifact (орудие), and the (abstract-material) object (объект) of the activity. This so-called activity triangle is better known today from the work of the Finn Yrjö Engeström (Engeström, 1987), who followed in the footsteps of Soviet activity theorists and added Rules, Community, and Division of Labor (Figure 5). Equally important was Leontiev’s (Леонтьев, 1975) distinction of the intention-driven action and the condition-triggered operation. I still believe that the distinction of action and operation is important in CALL research and in the practical application of digital technology in the classroom, in that it also helps distinguish the intention-driven actions of a human and the condition-triggered operations of a machine (Schulze, 2025).
Figure 5: Activity triangle (Engeström, 1987, p. 136)
I attended pedagogy lectures based on East German textbooks. These in turn were based on the concepts of the Soviet psychologist Pjotr Galperin (1902-1988), also in the school of Activity Theory. I learnt to structure my learning activities and lesson plans in line with the stepwise formation of mental actions (поэтапное формирование умственных действий). They went through six stages with their order and completeness being somewhat flexible in not only my practical teaching:
- Motivational and orienting stage (мотивационно-ориентировочный этап)
- Material action stage (этап материальных действий)
- Perceptual action stage (этап перцептивных действий)
- Verbal action stage – external speech (этап внешней речи)
- Verbal action stage – inner speech (этап внутренней речи)
- Mental action stage (этап умственного действия)
(Гальперин, 1957)
The lectures and seminars on psychology, pedagogy, didactics, and teaching methodology were not my favorite; I realized only when I began to teach that these theories were of great help in planning lessons and courses and were a clear lens for teacher reflection on the classes I taught. And, I learnt that the most important step in each lesson is to orient and motivate students early on in the activity. Galperin called this the orienting basis for the action (ориентировочная основа действия); North American sociocultural theory called it SCOBA – Schema for conceptualizing the orienting basis of the activity). In 2021, I co-edited a special journal issue on SCOBAs in language education (White et al., 2021), which focuses on how teachers can use SCOBAs in their language classes. Galperin (1957) discusses both the stages and the SCOBA in the context of concept-based language instruction (Lantolf & Poehner, 2014), which is discussed today under the broader heading of Sociocultural Theory (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006). Neither concept-based language instruction nor SCOBAs have been central to discussions of language learning and teaching with technology, although they would lend themselves well to such approaches.
References
Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by Expanding: An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Developmental Research. Orienta-Konsultit Oy.
Galperin, P. Y. (1957). An experimental study in the formation of mental actions. In B. Simon (Ed.), Psychology in the Soviet Union (pp. 213–225). Routledge.
Lantolf, J. P., & Poehner, M. (2014). Sociocultural Theory and the Pedagogical Imperative in L2 Education. Vygotskian Praxis and the Research/Practice Divide. Routledge.
Lantolf, J. P., & Thorne, S. L. (2006). Sociocultural Theory and the Genesis of Second Language Development. Oxford University Press.
Leontʹev, A. A. (1974). Psycholinguistik und Sprachunterricht. Übersetzt und herausgegeben von Gisela Schulz und Gerhard Seyfarth.
Leontʹev, A. N., & Galperin, P. Y. (1972). Probleme der Lerntheorie. Volk und Wissen.
Rubinstein, S. L. (1984). Grundlagen der allgemeinen Psychologie (Übersetzung der Originalausgabe Moskau 1946 von H. Hartmann). Volk und Wissen.
Schulze, M. (2025). ICALL and AI: Seven lessons from seventy years. In Y. Wang, A. Alm, & G. Dizon (Eds.), Insights into AI and language teaching and learning (pp. 11–31). Castedown Publishers.
White, B. J., Gánem-Gutiérrez, G. A., & Schulze, M. (Eds.). (2021). Conceptualization and orientation in concept-based language instruction. Special issue of Language and Sociocultural Theory 8.1. University of Toronto Press.
Гальперин, П. Я. (1957). Умственное действие как основа формирования мысли и образа. Вопросы психологии, № 6, 58–69.
Леонтьев, А. Н. (1975). Деятельность. Сознание. Личность. Политиздат.
