How Young is too Young? Investigating Negotiation of Meaning and Feedback in Children Aged Five to Seven Years

Today there is a considerable body of evidence demonstrating the importance of interaction in the process of second language acquisition (see Mackey & Goo, 2007; Keck, Iberri-Shea, Tracy, & Wa-Mbaleka, 2006, for their meta-analyses of the work undertaken in this area). In fact, so large is this body of evidence that the interaction hypothesis, the premise on which much of this work is based, has emerged as a dominant paradigm in the field (Byrnes, 2005). As Gass and Mackey (2006) suggest, “it is now commonly accepted . . . that there is a robust connection between interaction and learning” (p. 176).