Sociocultural Perspective for Interactive Discourse Studies and the Construction of Its Research Methodology

Sociocultural perspective is a newly arising research perspective in second language acquisition(SLA).Cognitive perspective and sociocultural perspective now form two contrasting schools in SLA research.This paper presents and demonstrates the theoretical and practical basis of sociocultural perspective of study on classroom discourse,arguing that research on foreign language classroom discourse should take the sociocultural perspective.A revised sociocultural discourse analysis that takes advantages of both qualitative and quantitative methods is proposed as an ideal localized research method in analyzing foreign language classroom discourse.