Murphey, T. (2013). Adapting ways for meaningful action: ZPDs and ZPAs. In J. Arnold & T. Murphey (Eds.), Meaningful action: Earl Stevick’s influence on language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp172-189 11. Adapting ways for meaningful action: ZPDs and ZPAs Tim Murphey “…adaptation is inevitable; it ought therefore to receive more attention and more prestige than it usually does. The other theme is that language study is inevitably a total human experience; writers and teachers ought therefore to act as though it is.” (Stevick, 1971:vii) Introduction This chapter suggests three beneficial shifts in our thinking concerning change and adaptation in the classroom. The first is to shift our thinking from stagnant entity categories to continual incremental adapting processes. Second, while observing, ourselves and others, and interacting help us to adapt, our techniques of observation and interaction can be improved. Third, while developing levels of comfort in homogeneous groups are important, developing abilities to engage and negotiate with diversity are eventually more crucial for stimulating innovation and well adjusted adaptation for a “total human experience.” Finally, I conclude that harmonizing, i.e. being in rapport with others and enjoying a learning flow, is not a thing but an activity which demands continual adjusting to the various changes inside and between participants in a complex world . Learning greatly depends on the ability of the people in learning encounters to adapt to each other in multiple ways to create meaningful actions that engage and motivate. It follows that this is not just a cognitive adjustment, but inevitably a total human experience. Earl Stevick wrote much about adapting and emphasized it often in his work. One of his early books was called Adapting and Writing Language Lessons (1971), on which I based my M.A. thesis “Situationally Motivated Teacher Produced Texts” where I proposed that teachers create their own texts adapted to local contexts and student-needs. Later I turned to more “situationally motivated student produced texts”, advocating that students could have a hand in producing many of the materials which would be even more relevant, at their level, and intensely student-centered. This necessarily displayed a certain amount of Trust in students as collaborators (see Candlin and Crichton, this volume) and invited more agency. Such adapting to student needs and local conditions is sometimes described as scaffolding (Woods et al 1976), an attempt to create and interact with students’ zones of proximal development (ZPDs), defined as “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky, 1978:86). Stevick also describes teachers adapting the way they use materials, “…the favorable reaction of the users [of the adapted materials] cannot be explained in terms of clever, innovative features of the materials themselves, for there were none. They depended, rather, on the extent to which the staff forced each of the ‘suggestions for use’ to yield both practical and psychological satisfactions…” (Stevick, 1971: 219). In 1996, at the centennial anniversary conference of Vygotsky and Piaget, I pointed out that teachers and students had variable abilities to adapt or adjust to partners and situations, displaying variable zones of proximal adjusting or ZPAs (Murphey 1996). Obviously, some people can and do adjust in many ways to help themselves and others learn, not only showing knowledge of motivational techniques and needed input and activities, but also giving emotional support and attention to relationship and identity factors. Most of us recognize that we can adjust well in certain situations with certain people and less so in others. Intuitively also, it stands to reason that it is easier for students to adjust to each other than to the teacher or native speakers, who are distant in proficiency, age, and possibly in interests. In 1990, I playfully explained adjusting in the following manner using figure 1: Figure 11.1: Café des Artists In the café, you (a) and I (b) are separated somewhat by our different backgrounds and world maps. The distance between our backgrounds (c) will dictate how much we will have to adjust to each other in order to have quality interaction. However, the context (d), the Café, is one that is fairly conducive to adjusting. The music is relaxing and there are just a few noises from the kitchen and occasionally the sound of traffic when someone enters (arrows). The different ways we can adjust (linguistically, emotionally, physically, etc.) are represented by the lines running through each of us. Ideally they match or mirror, each other. If they don’t match and we are unwilling to adjust to the other we will have problems communicating (Murphey, 1990: 3-4). Of course a classroom and café are not completely the same environments but the ways in which we adjust physically, emotionally, linguistically, etc. to interlocutors are quite similar and very important in building good rapport. Adapting shadowing ways Vygotsky's experiments had a specific set of questions to act as prompts to measure the ZPD of children,i.e. to measure what they knew and what they needed for a specific task. However, outside the laboratory, the variable abilities of interlocutors makes standard prompts highly unlikely in natural interaction. Aljaafreh and Lantolf (1994:468) state that the process of adjusting to the ZPD is a "continuous assessment of the novice's needs and abilities and the tailoring of help to those conditions." It is clear that learners are faced with teachers and partners who have varying ability to make those assessments and to tailor their help, i.e. different ZPAs. At the same time, learners vary in that they give different sets of clues as to the input they need for their particular learning at their particular stages. A silent student is often hard to help because we have little information to go on. Thus, ZPDs and ZPAs are interactive and influence each other considerably, they are not separate but co-constucting and actually everyone has both. The typical way of thinking about the ZPD is that teachers adjust to a learners’ ZPDs. However, different teachers have different degrees of flexibility to adjust depending on the learner, topic, and process. And learners may have strategies that help others to adjust to them ( e.g. shadowing and displaying what they need). Thus, all interactants have both ZPDs and ZPAs, students working together as well as teachers working with students, and while we usually assume that it is the more capable partner who is responsible for adjusting to the less proficient, everyone can actually adjust in many ways to each other and everybody has their own ZPD. For simplicity purposes in what follows however, we will focus mainly on learners ZPDs and teachers ZPAs (but still hopefully teachers are learning at the same time to broaden their ZPD and students are also adjusting to each other in interactive classes). When the ZPDs and ZPAs significantly overlap as in figure 2 below, there is a good match between students’ readiness to learn and a helper’s ability to provide what they need. Figure 11.2 The Zone of Learning Flow Shadowing (Murphey, 2001) is one simple strategy that can help interlocutors construct better ZPAs and ZPDs, and, at the micro-interaction level, it seems to hold a lot of promise for giving more actual control of a conversation to the less able partner. Shadowing is simply repeating the words someone says immediately after they say it, on continuums from completely to partially, outloud to silently, and with no interaction to full blown rejoinders, comments, and questions. However, this simple repeating can have a variety of effects psychologically for learning and pragmatically, especially in conversational discourse. Being shadowed usually causes one to chunk their phrases to the length that a partner can comfortably repeat. In effect, shadowing shows the speaker the moment to moment processing that goes on inside the learner's brain so that appropriate adjustments can be made. When working with this in class, I generally have students do complete shadowing only at the beginning of conversations and in trouble spots (otherwise Grice's maxim of quantity, saying too much, would be violated). After initially showing what they are capable of through complete shadowing, learners are asked to switch to selective and interactive shadowing with questions and comments which is actually more like a good normal conversation with parts of each other’s speech being repeated for confirmation and clarification. Research on shadowing (Murphey 2001a) shows that a lot of Long's (1983) strategies and tactics (see Table 1) occur automatically when students shadow each other in classroom conversations. Below, ST6, “Repeat other’s utterances” seems to be a simple form of shadowing itself whereas T2, “Request clarification” is what is implied pragmatically when a repeated utterance is very different, or the shadower stops short or uses rising intonation when repeating. Using these strategies well produces a kind of natural shadowing and help develop interlocutors’ ZPDs and ZPAs (cf. Guerrero and Commander, forthcoming). Table1 Devices used by native speakers to modify the interactional structure of NS-NNS conversation (Long′ 1983) Strategies (S) (for avoiding trouble) Sl Relinquish topic― control S2 Select salient topics S3 Treat topics briefly S4 Make new topics salient S5 Check NNS’s comprehension Tactics (T) (for repairing trouble) Tl Accept unintentional topic―switch T2 Request clarification T3 Confirm own comprehension T4 Tolerate ambiguity Strategies and Tactics(ST) (for avoiding and repairing trouble) STl Use slow pace ST5 Repeat own utterances ST2 Stress key words ST6 Repeat other′s utterances ST3 Pause before key words ST4 Decompose topic-comment constructions Shadowing is also similar to active listening and Rogerian listening, repeating done by counselors and psychotherapists to help speakers hear more what they are actually saying and know also that they are being heard. The positive affect of these ways of interacting become evident in the classroom as students pay closer attention to interlocutors and confirm each others’ utterances by shadowing. Stevick (1989) describes shadowing in reference to five of the seven excellent learners he studied in his book on successful learners. One of them, Ed, describes silently shadowing: “…when my mind works on vocalizing it [what the teacher is saying] inside, I hear the sound. I hear myself saying the sound, in my own voice…almost as an echo of what the teacher is saying” (p. 83). Later he provides a good description of conversational shadowing: “One of the things that I like to do is …mimic out loud, perhaps in reply to a question. Or not even a question, but in a conversation. I let him say something, and then I just say the same thing back, changing it slightly so that it’s suitable as a continuation of the conversation” (p. 97). We all have variable capacities and techniques to get our interlocutors to adjust to us. To some teachers and helpers with little experience interacting with learners, the standard adjustment to non-comprehension might simply be (inappropriately) to speak louder. But when learners dare to repeat what their helpers say, however different it may be, they are at least showing what they have understood and at the same time what they are capable of to their interlocutors who can then take this information and adjust more qualitatively to what might be needed. Equally, when tutors repeat back what they have understood from learners, they are using shadowing to mediate their ZPA, i.e. their situated ability to learn to adjust. Adjusting, then, is a co-constructing phenomenon that goes on “inside and between people” (Stevick, 1980:4). Elsewhere, I have described several other mediational tools and activities that allow teachers to adapt more to their students’ levels, strategy-use, perceptions and values: action logs, newsletters, class publications, and students’ “longitudinal self evaluated videos” (Murphey, 2001b, 2007). These tools also allow students to re-view performances and make adjustments that might increase their learning and fluency in subsequent encounters. Timing is also important— individuals and groups of people can be more or less ready for certain changes, certain ideas, and these ideas need to be in relative proximity to what they are already doing and believing for them to consider adopting these new ways of thinking, talking, and doing. It is important to notice that ZPAs, while certainly helping cognitive development, are not merely about adjusting cognitively. Atkinson (2011) described the over domineering influence of cognitivism in SLA and the need for alternative social approaches. Stevick often emphasized the importance of paying attention to community, emotions, beliefs and attitudes. Some years ago, Schumann (1999) and Arnold (2000) helped to create interest in affect as a field for SLA inquiry and we are benefiting from a plethora of new studies (Dewale, 2010; Pavelenko, 2005; Kalaja and Barcelos, 2003). I feel beliefs and attitudes are really the driving force behind opening up ZPAs and ZPDs, and that these zones either shrink or expand depending on the degree of rapport and trust in a group. Too often adjusting has been seen as unilateral, placing the learner in a passive position at first and the teacher/helper in the active position of doing all the adjusting to the learners’ ZPD so the learner learns. However, with our more recent conceptions of negotiation and collaborative construction of understanding, learning is also being co-constructed, although not necessarily the same kind of learning for all parties. Both teachers and students may be learning new ways to adjust, or how to adjust for the particular learner they are with, or learning that some ways are not working well, all of which also adds to their repertoire of adjusting capabilities with future students, thus expanding their zone of proximal adjusting. ZPDs and ZPAs operate dynamically with different partners in different contexts at different moments and their fit needs continuous negotiation. At the metadiscursive level, effective learners often decide to talk more with partners who they know adjust well to them, and thus they shape their environment in order to be with those people with whom they feel they can learn best. Effective learners can and do explicitly ask for reformulation, clarifications, and they interrupt. In other words, they negotiate an understanding of what they are learning. In a general sense they are assertive and more conscious of what they need. In some of my classes I have asked students to ask their conversation partners if they want to be shadowed or not, giving them the choice. This gets them to be more conscious and more agentive of how they can actively shape their own learning. Ways of inviting students to proactively adjust to each other At the level of classroom organization, simply allowing students to interact with learning material, to teach each other, and to co-construct meaning can be immensely beneficial leading them to model each other not only in the present linguistically, as with shadowing above, but holistically through strategies, beliefs and attitudes. Varonis and Gass (1985), Long and Porter (1985), and Donato (1994) provide evidence that students can help each other co-construct needed input within their ZPDs and scaffold their learning without an expert. Oliver (1996) has shown how even small children modify (adjust) their input for NNS children. As I said above, I believe that it is easier for students to adjust to each other than to teachers or native speakers, who are distant in proficiency and possibly in interests. Learners are often already in proximal relationships. When they interact together they can become near peer role models (NPRMs, Murphey and Arao 2001; Singh, 2010) for each other, displaying proximal strategies, beliefs, and attitudes that other learners feel they can adopt. It is true that some students insist on believing the myth that “I can only learn from native speakers,” but often after experiencing more active learning with their peers this fallacy is revealed to them. NPRMs can be “near” in many ways, age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, interests, past or present experiences, aspirations, and also in proximity and in frequency of social contact. In the three examples below, I am not so much concerned with cognitive language learning structures as I am with adjusting to and changing emotional/belief systems (which may be a precondition for opening and expanding ZPAs and ZPDs) which seems to happen more easily among NPRMs. Action logs and newsletters: Telephoning in English Student action logging entails students listing the activities we do in each class and evaluating them and then writing a general comment about the class or specifically about the homework (as might be directed by the teacher). I read students action logs weekly and select positive comments from them that I think might be helpful for other students. I place the comments anonymously on a handout that I call a class newsletter, for all the students to shadow read. In pairs in the next class, one student reads a comment and the other (with their newsletter covered) shadows, summarizes, and says something about the comment, perhaps having a short conversation about the topic if they like. They then switch roles with each newsletter comment. In this way students support each others’ learning in positive ways. They discover and often adopt new beliefs and strategies that peers are using. (Guerrero and Commander, forthcoming, are experimenting with some very interesting shadowing procedures with reading). One typical example often noted in the newsletters at the beginnings of a semester is “telephone homework.” I ask my students to telephone each other in English for homework. At first, about half do not like the activity and, thus, do not get the full benefit of the exercise. However there are some students who do the activity and who enjoy it. I assemble their positive comments about this activity and put them in the newsletter: Wow, I called and talked for 20 minutes all in English. It was fun. Of course we talked more than just about the homework. I like this homework. My mom and dad were surprised! They heard me speak English. And they could not understand! That was fun. When I pass the newsletters out, I tell students that some people did not like the activity, but some did and they may be interested in reading about what they liked. Reading their peers' positive comments about the activity helps those that did not like the activity to reevaluate the activity. So they usually give it another chance and try it with new enthusiasm. Notice that it is not the teacher who tells learners this is a good and fun way to learn, but rather peers who have similar interests and who are in proximal relationships, who, as near peer role models, are more believable. Thus, a good activity, in which there was little buy-in from the students, has been valorized by some of their peers, which in turn encourages more students to try the activity and benefit from actual language use outside the classroom. Video interviews of potential NPRMs In two quasi-experimental studies (Murphey and Arao, 2001), learners in a Japanese university English department were shown an 8-minute video of four exemplary, slightly older, Japanese students in the same department who were expressing beliefs and attitudes thought to facilitate SLA. A pre- and post-questionnaire revealed positive changes in viewers' reported-beliefs. In a later study we wished to see the impact of the same video-speakers on non-English majors in obligatory English courses in a different university. The results showed that many of these students' reported-beliefs and behaviors also changed positively after seeing the video and that they seemed to remain more motivated through post observations. Interestingly, the experiment also changed the teacher's beliefs, which made her class more interactive and possibly intensified Near Peer Role Modeling. While the study above describes the use of short videos of similar students in other classes and how they are powerful NPRMs, the same can and does happen with one’s own classmates, especially with a little teacher broadcasting of effective student beliefs and strategies (as with the newsletter above with positive student comments about telephoning). Regular videoing, as with LSEV (see below), also offers prime opportunities for modeling other learners’ attitudes, strategies, and beliefs, and can turn a class of individuals into a more cohesive group (Dornyei and Murphey, 2003) as they start noticing the positive attributes of their classmates and emotional contagion spreads (Hatfield, et al. 1994). Longitudinal Self-Evaluated Videoing (LSEV) I have been videoing my students in classes for over 15 years in a variety of ways and found that it is an ecologically efficient way for them to get feedback on their languaging performances (Swain, 2006) which then stimulates adaptive changes on their part. In Longitudinal Self-Evaluated Videoing (LSEV), students are periodically video recorded as they perform speaking tasks such as conversations, debates, and presentations in their L2. Students carry out additional tasks as they watch the videos of themselves and sometimes their peers speaking. For example, they transcribe and analyze their conversation, or they note down the main content points of a classmate’s presentation, and write a letter to their partner giving feedback both on the content and the delivery of the presentation. These examples show how the procedures of LSEV provide an open platform for a variety of taskbased learning activities through collaborative and experiential learning, as well as studentcentered pedagogy. (Murphey and Sakaguchi 2010:97) In 2004, Nishimura was a participant observer for a semester in one of my classes where weekly videoing of students conversations were the main activity. She observed students in general and studied three students in particular. She analyzed their end-of-semester videotapes, their learning journals, and their final papers as well as interviewing them through email. While she found evidence of self and other modeling in students’ learning logs, some were more capable modelers than others. Students who seemed to work mostly alone and did not seem to admire others as much, and who may have worked harder than others, still did not seem to progress as much as those who were very open to admiring and imitating others. She concluded that the videoing offered many opportunities to do self and other modeling, and that the processes were complementary rather than discrete choices (Nishimura 2005). Our original research question had been, “What are the particular characteristics of other and self modeling?” This wrongly assumed that they were two separate processes when they actually are one dialectical fusion, or as Aboulafia (1986:125) says, “The self sees itself in the other and the other in the self.” Bakhtin’s dialogism helps explain the co-construction of self and other modeling, leading us to understand that the question of “Who owns or says the words?” is not a helpful question in a coconstructed conversation in which we build on each other’s utterances (see Byrnes, this volume). Holquist (1990:13) says that for Bakhtin, “utterance is understood as an act of authorship, or … of co-authorship”. Perhaps most relevant to our understanding of self and other modeling, Bakhtin holds that: …in order to see our selves, we must appropriate the vision of others. Restated in its crudest version, the Bakhtinian just-so story of subjectivity is the tale of how I get my self from the other: it is only the other’s categories that will let me be an object for my own perception. I see myself as I conceive others might see it. In order to forge a self, I must do so from outside. In other words, I author myself. (p. 28) Watching yourself on video is indeed seeing the self as “others might see it,” and you actually become an “other.” It can be disconcerting at first and actually many people do not like watching themselves the first few times. But once one gets use to it, the advantages of seeing how you are actually performing are undeniable, as practically any professional athlete, actor, or dancer will attest. And language learners can also notice how co-constructed their performances are. Many students actually write about how helpful their partners were in class, and sometimes how unhelpful they were, in their action logs: for example one student recently wrote in her action log, “I spoke good today because my partner was funny.” Another wrote, “What made me upset was my partner was reluctant to join the class.” In Baktin’s words: Our speech, that is, all our utterances (including creative works), is filled with others’ words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of ‘our own ness,’ varying degrees of awareness and detachment. These words of others carry with them their own expression, their own evaluative tone, which we assimilate, rework and accentuate. (Bakhtin, 1986:89) Notice that in the above research, students are finding good examples of the proximal changes they deem enriching and finding ways to adjust so that they can do as and believe as their NPRMs. In the first example students were modeling positive reports of doing the telephoning activity; in the second, when watching slightly older peers express their beliefs, students tended to adopt their beliefs. Lastly, when watching videos of themselves and others conversing, they get to see themselves as others see them and can appreciate both what they and their partners do well and what needs to be improved and take more agentive control over their own adjusting for improvement. Notice also that in many of these examples, participants are choosing to model proactive examples from imagined communities of practice (Norton, 2001) i.e. communities of others whom they may never meet (e.g. “Japanese students who speak well” on the video) or who may never even exist in reality (characters in books and movies, see Quinn 2010) but who are never the less useful to imagine and can drive one’s motivation. The adjusting harmonizer We not only adjust ourselves to a variety of partners, but we also adjust ourselves to a changing world and the dialectics that we have in mind. Here too we have variable ZPDs and ZPAs. Stevick wrote about the dialects of self and community when describing two methods that he had researched in depth. First on the Silent Way: The Silent Way … sees the Self of the learner as isolated and independent. It also sees the splendid power that that Self can have—that it can develop—when it comes to know itself and so to shape itself. The Self for Gattegno’s Science of Education is the “Invictus” of William Ernest Henley’s well-known poem, who thanked “whatever gods may be/for my unconquerable soul,” and who in defiance cried out to the world that “I am the master of my fate!” As this finally and fiercely lonely Self develops, it may come to give something of its own to the world in which it finds itself and to some of the other Selves around it, while at the same time learning to learn from those Selves. Among them, a group of such Selves may attain a degree of “community.” (Stevick, 1998:168) And then on Counseling-Learning: The life-affirmation of Counseling-Learning is in some respects exactly the reverse of the Silent Way’s. It too sees the individual as alone. But where the Silent Way affirms the aloneness of the learner and pushes him or her to come face to face with that aloneness and to live through it and beyond it, Counseling-Learning begins by reducing aloneness through the warm, total, womblike support of the counselor-teacher. In addition, the lonely Self of each learner receives support as it finds its place in a developing community of other learning Selves. (ibid.) Stevick concludes that in both methods, “the path the learner follows runs between independence and community, but it runs in opposite directions…The Silent Way focuses mainly on the cognitive work—the cognitive adventures—that meet the learning Self. Counseling Learning gives more explicit attention to interpersonal and intrapersonal forces of all kinds” and despite their differences, he still insisted that each “is in its own way a fresh and hopeful affirmation of life” (ibid.). Even earlier in his career, Stevick suggested the balancing metaphor of “harmony” and that learning had more to do with the positioning of one’s self in a world of meaningful action: “My earlier conclusion was that success depends less on materials, techniques, and linguistic analyses, and more on what goes on inside and between the people in the classroom” (Stevick, 1980:4). He emphasized the ever changing rapport among people as a main inducer of effective learning: “I have begun to suspect that the most important aspect of ‘what goes on’ is the presence or absence of harmony—it is the parts working with, or against, one another” (p5). Below I try to schematically translate Stevick’s sense of harmony into a diagram, what Galperinz called a SCOBA, a “schema for the orienting basis of action ... SCOBAs provide learners with resources that are then formulated as a plan of action . . .” (in Lantolf, 2011: 38). Figure 3 is merely meant to help us think about how we might adjust ourselves in our classes, lives, and contexts to achieve more meaningful action. I do not equate “inside and between” with “intermental and intramental,” nor with “autonomy and community,” but they are similar in some obvious ways. A diagram of course is not moving and thus is limited in its capacity to show continual adjusting and the moving of all the parts (please use your imagination). Figure 3 attempts to show that there is potential trouble for learners if they go too far to either extreme (becoming a lone cowboy or a sheep, i.e. being too independent (isolated) or losing the self in the crowd) and there is wisdom in changing and adapting as a person-in-context (Ushioda, 2009) and being more or less centered. In the circle below, a person ideally moves about ecologically, adjusting appropriately to needs and enjoying the benefits of all the pairings. At times we might err toward an extreme, but hopefully we are soon brought back into the harmonizing circle which is continually changing—figure 3 is always in progress. Figure 3: Dynamic Dialectical Adjusting Harmonizer (DDAH) In a class, an extreme example of the above might be the somewhat autistic student who has trouble reading and adjusting to others and who stays in his own world. At the other extreme is the student who only wants to do what others are doing and leaves little room for the development of the independent self. A more balanced student takes advantage of what the community offers and feels belonging, but is not totally lost therein. Rather the self becomes stronger as the community develops and the student still can act with critical thinking and agency of their own. Obviously teachers want to have ways of adjusting themselves to these extreme types of students in order to challenge them to become more balanced, benefiting both from community and independence. In music, harmony only exists in harmonizing patterns of movement, of waves, through the air. No movement, no music, no harmony. We need movement to live, to adapt, to balance, to harmonize. A life in harmony is continually adapting and adjusting to changing circumstances, moving contexts, selves, chaos and complexity, moving to create more harmony. Figure 3 is in progress (and perhaps always should be moving, changing, and adapting). The ZPD and ZPA of our field Some members operating in the field of SLA are adjusting so as to look at what they have in common and how they can support each other. Stevick (1971:2). has also expressed concern about the many theoretical and practical bandwagon shifts in our field: As each linguistic or psychological principle is (re) discovered, new materials must be written to conform to it, and before us nothing was. Each generation sees in its predecessors the dead hand of the past, and each innovating coterie feels that in some sense it has finally devised a method that is “as elastic and adaptable as life is restless and variable” (Jespersen, 1904:4). The field of SLA most recently has been going through a social turn (Block, 2003; Atkinson, 2011) and a narrative turn (Swain et al. 2011). Lourdes Ortega (2011) has proposed that we accept, adopt, and appreciate “epistemological diversity.” Her significant contribution is to allow us to see how cognitivists and alternatives overlap and are doing similar things, to discover complementarity where some in both camps could even support each other: …[W]e have a choice in SLA studies among entrenchment, incommensurability, and epistemological diversity. Entrenchment is likely to be a temperamental reaction that is unsustainable in the long run. Incommensurability is an option that some may find merit in at this juncture in the history of SLA studies. I want to argue that the third option, epistemological diversity, is the best choice (Ortega, 2005:176) Ortega ends citing Lugones (2003) at length and concludes that: From traveling to others’ “worlds” emerges the possibility of not only agentive resistance from within accommodation but also empathic understanding of difference, instead of conflictive and hopeless feelings of entrenchment and incommensurability. If we can experience ourselves as more than one and others as they experience both themselves and us, then perhaps we can also understand how other people understand and judge their own knowledge and theories and how they understand and judge ours. This, in turn, makes it possible to imagine ourselves and others as less epistemologically unitary and impermeable than we may be otherwise inclined to assume. (p.177-178) To summarize and conclude 1. Students learn in different ways, depending at times on partners and contexts, and often because of the variable ZPAs of partners to adjust to their ZPDs. 2. Learners can develop strategies that help others to adjust to them in interaction in the target language, expanding their partners’ ZPAs which in turn expand their ZPDs. 3. In negotiated interaction, partners can change and learn new, although perhaps different, things from each other. Everybody has both a ZPD and a ZPA. 4. Highlighting and “broadcasting” positive examples of practice within a group would seem to be an ecological process of sociocultural change, i.e. learning and emotional contagion. They are not only learning more language, but making friends, enjoying themselves, and learning about the world, what we might call “value added language learning.” 5. Being NPRMs for others may facilitate such learning and learning how to “near” others (get close to people and imagine their worlds, cf Ortega above) may create even more learning opportunities, i.e. a modeling of diversity. 6. While NPRMing seems to be a natural phenomenon, diversity modeling may need the help of educators to eliminate some of the fear of the unknown, opening us up to more differential harmonies. 7. Adapting/adjusting to achieve more harmony would seem to be a continual process involving numerous simultaneous and emerging tasks for an individual or a group. This challenge/hope/desire to achieve more harmony apparently pushes and drives much of humanity toward meaningful altruistic action. 8. Time and people and circumstances are continually moving and thus human stories are moving and never ending. And so may our learning be. From such stances of historical understandings and open epistemological diversity, I believe we can continually develop more adaptable frameworks from which to approach our diversity. One that honors and seeks harmony inside and between all of us. Note: This chapter is based in part on the following two conference papers: ‘Proactive Adjusting to the Zone of Proximal Development: Learner and Teacher Strategies’ in a symposium organized by Gordon Wells entitled ‘The ZPD: relationship between education and development.’ September 11-15 1996, Geneva , Switzerland, The 2nd Conference for Socio-Cultural Research Vygotsky-Piaget, (celebrating both researchers who were both born in 1896). At the Psychological Sciences Research Institute: Geneva, Switzerland. ‘Strategies for Zoning in on the ZPD’in the colloquium on Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development March 14, 2000, Vancouver, B.C. Canada, American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL). References Aboulafia, M. 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