Feedback in its actual forms has gained momentum because many developments in teaching and learning in schools and in the foreign-language classroom in particular have facililtated the implementation of a feedback culture. In the last decades, education in schools has become more and more learner-oriented. On this basis, formative feedback practices have become more and more important and specified in order to help teachers and learners to overcome the concentration on the person of the teacher and on drill-based forms of instruction. Today, feedback is no longer a one-way road, but also reaches teachers and is complemented by various other forms of feedback. This general positive development was further promoted by the changes in foreign-language instruction from the Grammar-Translation-Method to Intercultural Communication, with the aim of coming as close to real-life settings as possible.

Stimulating emergent literacy is one of the main goals of early childhood education. In order to accomplish this, the orientation to different aspects of literacy can be integrated into classroom interaction, as is shown in Chapter 10 of this Handbook. We demonstrate how early childhood educators can use children’s spontaneous attention to written text as a base for meaningful interaction by explicating their own acts of literacy and by talking with children whenever they read and write themselves. We also demonstrate how attention to literacy can be incorporated into shared reading interactions, by orienting the children to the structure of a story, the role of a book title and their understanding of the story. In addition, early childhood educators may organize meaningful activities in which children discuss literacy issues in peer interaction, while trying to write and to construct texts together. Illustrated by everyday examples, this chapter stresses the importance of eliciting meaningful teacher-child interaction and peer interaction around written text.

In its broadest definition, computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is any learning that involves two or more learners as well as one or more computers. CSCL research studies how collaboration contributes to learning and how computer technology can facilitate collaborative learning. This chapter discusses CSCL in terms of four conceptions: (1) collaborative knowledge building; (2) dialogic interaction; (3) intersubjective meaning making; (4) group cognition. CSCL research demonstrates that collaboration among students – when well-designed to scaffold student interactions – is more effective than teachers delivering information to students through a recorded lecture or a synchronous video meeting. This chapter reviews major themes in CSCL, including: empirical studies of cooperative learning in groups; theoretical explanations of learning as an emergent, collective phenomenon; conceptions of knowledge as interactions between learners, rather than as mental representations in student’s heads; and the use of interaction analysis to study moment-to-moment collaborations.

Bottlenose dolphins are a large-brained, long-lived, highly social species, operating within a fission-fusion society characterized by broad multi-level social networks, extensive care giving and teaching of offspring, cooperative and diverse hunting tactics, long-term alliances, and learned vocal signals that broadcast an individual’s identity, can be used in referential exchanges and can be imitated by close associates.Observations of behavior and social interactions in the wild suggest that social cognition in the bottlenose dolphins is well developed.Over the past thrity years, experimental studies have revealed that bottlenose dolphins have decades long social memories of associates, can develop a broad concept of imitation that extends to arbitrary novel sounds and social behaviors presented in a variety of contexts as well as to self-initiated behaviors.Dolphins have also been shown to be able to learn about and appreciate the social requisites of cooperative behavior, can spontaneously understand the referential character of human-initiated social signals involving pointing and gazing, and can employ pointing productively in communicative exchanges with humans to achieve goals.Collectively, dolphin social-cognition abilities are sophisticated and similar in several aspects to those of other species living within complex social networks, such as elephants, chimpanzees, and humans.

We have already explored how students learn both individually and socially, and how teachers draw from a range of learning theories to provide opportunities that motivate and engage students by optimising resources in the learning environment. In this chapter, we drill down into specific teaching approaches and strategies that are aligned with constructivist and sociocultural learning theories. In this chapter, you will undertake the groundwork to prepare you with an array of ideas and tools to be well equipped for teaching. We consider how to foster a classroom environment that supports a rich learning culture, implementing different ways of teaching that used in combination in professional practice you can use with your students to assist them to become effective learners. If you are to foster learning partnerships in the classroom where students have ‘voice and choice’ (Garry, Fodchuk & Hobbs, 2017), you will need to understand how to promote their active participation. The chapter concludes with an examination of frameworks that promote powerful learning, effective teaching and enable students to learn how to learn.