ABSTRACT

Drawing on my analysis of a storytelling and story-acting practice that I have studied in a range of preschool classes, this chapter explores some of the ways in which peer-group activities can serve as a powerful context for promoting young children’s language development, and in particular their narrative development. One implication of this analysis, I argue, is to reinforce a central organizing theme of the present volume: the need to rethink, refine, and broaden the conceptions of the “social context” of development now employed by most psychological research in this area. Explicitly or implicitly, this context tends to be conceived too exclusively in terms of adult–child interaction (usually dyadic), in which the more knowledgeable and capable adult takes on the role of instructing, guiding, correcting, and/or “scaffolding” the efforts of the less capable child. Even when interaction between children is studied, it is usually assimilated to the one-way expert–novice model, with the older sibling or other peer taking on the “expert” role.