This chapter introduces the concept of collaborative competence. A broad view of how collaboration has been defined and studied within fields ranging from human–computer interaction to team cognition to dialogic education and collaborative problem-solving is discussed. Contexts for researching such processes have included shared narrative and experiential awareness of internal states, among other nontraditional procedures. The account of collaborative competence presented here synthesizes key aspects of prior findings while proposing a more broadly applicable theory and method for understanding development as a collaborative process. Accordingly, collaborative competence allows for an assessment of interactive quality along multiple dimensions. These include the extent to which all participants contribute to a shared activity as well the cognitive and social-emotional complexity of the collaboration. Elements of collaborative complexity include jointly created conceptual understandings, shared meanings, and the degree of emotional attunement and social reciprocity that characterize both the processes and products of the collaboration.

Chapter 4 discusses foundational studies linking theoretical findings in second language acquisition and classroom research. The first part of the chapter presents the linguistic background for adverb placement in English and in French within the Principles and Parameters framework of Universal Grammar and then focuses on intervention studies on the acquisition of verb movement and adverb placement in English as a second language by Francophone children in Montreal. The second part of the chapter focuses on question formation in English, the developmental sequences learners of English go through in the acquisition of questions in English, and Pienemann’s Processability Theory, which has been the impetus for important studies on the acquisition of question formation in English as a second language.

Parents often wonder whether children acquiring two languages simultaneously will attain native competences in both. In order to answert this question, we must contrast bilinguals’ language development with that of monolinguals. This requires a basic understanding of monolingual first language (L1) acquisition: It is always successful, happens at a fast rate and uniformly in that children proceed through identical developmental phases. These properties can be explained if we assume that L1 acquisition is guided by an innate Language Making Capacity (LMC), comprising general-purpose and language-specific cognitive principles. The latter make up the The Language Acquisition Device (LAD). Unversal Grammar (UG), a subcomponent of the LAD, consists of principles specifying formal properties of human languages. The simultaneous acquisition of two languages from birth exhibits the same properties as L1 development. Developmental sequences are non-distinct in bilinguals and monolinguals, and bilingual development happens at appproximately the same rate. It can thus indeed be qualified as bilingual first language acquisition.