This chapter reviews research designed to inform assessment of early elementary collaborative learning. The various literatures focus on the following contexts for learning and development: classroom quality, parent–child interactions, and peer collaborations. Across these different relational contexts, certain key features that promote optimal development are identified. For example, assessments of classrooms that focus on teacher–student interactions that are attuned to the norms of children’s cultures and that promote student voice and personal connection to the curriculum are found to be highly relevant. In the parent–child interaction literature, microinteractions in which parents coregulate children’s affective and cognitive functioning influence positive child outcomes when the affective content is positive and the history of the parent–child relationship is one of sensitive responsiveness and shared goals. Within the peer collaboration literature, support for contingency, shared control, joint attention, and engagement are most crucial and can be provided by specific tools and materials, including technology. Language exchanges are most generative of new learning when there is support for exploratory talk embedded in the activity and/or supported by the teacher. These contexts vary in the extent to which they reflect traditional Western schooling versus the community participation models of learning in the majority world. The ideal context is one that is both widely culturally valid and generative for learning via collaboration.

Each developmental period can be associated with the activity that plays a leading role in children’s lives during this period. The model of leading activities is culturally specific – leading activities are shaped by a given culture and subculture and reflect both the children’s abilities and the expectations of their parents and other mentors. Socioculturally constructed leading activities serve as a motor of child development. Within each of the developmental periods, activity-dependent cognitive and interpersonal skills lead to the formation of a new motive that corresponds to the new leading activity that becomes dominant during the next developmental period. The relationships between children and their sociocultural environment are reciprocal – the leading activities offered to children interact with children’s emerging abilities and motives, while these abilities and motives are shaped and developed by the leading activities. The following leading activities typical for industrial and post-industrial societies are examined: infancy – direct emotional contact with the caregiver; early childhood – joint object-centered activity; preschool age – sociodramatic play; elementary school age – formal learning; middle and high school age – peer interaction; adulthood – work activity.

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.

A telecollaborative language exchange program was implemented between Italian learners of English (from Roma Tre University) and Californian learners of Italian (from California State University, Long Beach). The main purpose was to give students more opportunities for meaningful and goal-oriented communication than they would usually have in their educational contexts. The program involved more than forty people of the two languages/cultures from October 2018 to May 2019. Learners’ needs were first identified in order to elaborate the tasks for the program, which was highly appreciated by the participants. Interesting suggestions for improvement were provided by the students, allowing us to revise the plan for a future implementation. In this case study, participants, structure and characteristics of the program are described, with a focus on needs analysis and task development. Examples of the teaching materials used in the program are provided.

This chapter presents an overview of the research on peer feedback in L2 oral interaction. The chapter starts with types and characteristics of peer feedback, followed by the discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of peer feedback to explain the benefits of peer interaction in L2 development. The next section presents a review of the studies on peer feedback focusing on the effect of peer feedback on L2 development and factors affecting this type of feedback. The chapter concludes with some pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research on peer feedback in L2 oral interaction.

A strong role for gendered differences in communication has long been substantiated by sociolinguistic research. It is thus likely that gender also plays a role in how second language feedback is given by teachers and peers and how it is received by language learners. We provide an overview of the limited body of research examining the impact of gender on second language feedback. While several studies have shown differences in how learners receive oral feedback from male and female teachers and peers, conflicting results have been found, and little research has considered the role of gender in written corrective feedback. Further research is needed to clarify the role of gender on feedback, which cannot be understood without consideration of the complex interplay among learner gender, interlocutor gender, culture, task, and context. We call for (1) increased research in diverse educational and cultural contexts, (2) research that considers the role of gender in feedback provided in written as well as oral language use, (3) developmental studies investigating whether descriptive differences impact learning, and (4) consideration of the role of gender that goes beyond binary divisions, adopting qualitative and critical discourse analysis perspectives to understand how gendered language socializations impact second language feedback.