Mediating Artifact And Tool: The Development Of Activity Theory

The development of activity theory has been described as going through three generations (Engestrom, 2001). It is regarded as being initiated by Vygotsky (1978), and his introduction of the concept of mediated action is usually represented in a triangle diagram (Figure 1). Mediating Artifact / Tool

Subject Object
Figure 1. Vygotsky’s basic mediated action triangle (Cole & Engestrom, 1993).
Vygotsky (1978) argued that human consciousness developed through interactions with an environment, to be more specific, with artifacts, tools, and social others in the environment (Yamagata-Lynch, 2010). Vygotsky believed that interactions might create mediational

Two interacting activity systems as a minimal model for the third generation of activity theory. (Engestrom, 2001).
The analysis model of the third generation contains no less than two intersecting activity systems, which is identified as the minimal unit of analysis (Engestrom, 2001). The involvement of multiple activity systems makes it possible to recognize and analyze the contradictions among different activity systems (Engestrom, 2001, 2010), which, in return, increases the possibilities to establish a “potentially shared and joint constructed object” (Engestrom, 2001, p. 136) among different activity systems.
Activity theory, originated from Vygotsky’s concept of mediated action, has gone through three generations. Focusing on the consciousness development of individual, Vygotsky argued for the mediational influence that individual receives from the environment. The second and the third generations of activity theory, to the contrary, have taken the wholeness of human activity as the unit of analysis, and both generations specify the social components that interact with individuals in an environment. Therefore, both the second and third generation of activity theory examine the multidirectional influences and impacts between individuals and

The adaptation of activity theory in language teacher education enables scholars and researchers to take personal factors and contextual factors into account, for the inquiry of functions of each component in an activity system, and influences from one another holistically as a collective of components. In consequence, scholars and researchers in language teacher education will depict a holistic portray of the trajectory of individual teacher development through the lens of activity