| Summary: | This paper describes an alternative approach to the teaching of concepts related to the
English Curriculum. It combines a shift in the theory of school teaching with
psychological theory development. This research was conducted at a private, Catholic
Secondary School in Johannesburg over a period of almost six months with a class of
twenty Grade Ten students. The research was designed in response to the fact that many
traditional, ‘rote’ teaching methods are not effective in the classroom and that an
alternative needs to be found. This research aimed at testing the theories of the Sociohistorical
school in order to ascertain whether they could provide clues as to methods that
might be more conducive to real learning. Vygotsky’s (1978) theoretical construct of the
Zone of Proximal Development, Hedegaard’s (1996) idea of a ‘double move’ and the
ideas posited by Wells (1996, 1999) and Tharp and Gallimore (1988, 1992) form the
theoretical basis for these ‘alternative’ teaching methods. The results shown in this paper
indicate that a ‘double move’ is possible within the context of the English classroom and
that the ideas of the Socio-historical school indeed provide an alternative method that is
far more successful than those traditionally used in most classrooms.
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