A contras~ive ana~ys~s o~t e a c~e r -~t~e n t and pew c o~l~o~~t i o n s reveals diverse approaches to writing. Results ofthis study suggest that children draw on social and affective resources to support cognitive and linguistic aspects ofwritten language development. Maureen Ready, Terrence TivnanThis chapter outlines theoretical issues in the social construction of literacy, focusing on the role of expertise, talk, and activity. We contrast children's interactions with a teacher, who models expert literacy strategies, and interactions among young peers, whose spontaneous strategies differ from those of the teacher but are nonetheless effective as instructional supports, especially for some children. Our study illustrates how children's active engagement with peers around written texts can be more important for certain aspects of literacy development than access to an expert. These results suggest that literacy development is a complex process, involving social and affective factors as well as cognitive factors like expert planning strategies and knowledge. Teachers and other experts can instruct children on culturally privileged features of literacy, but children must have opportunities to integrate these features into their own diverse, spontaneous oral and written genres. Children's effective manipulation of text forms appears to be centered on meaning making, personal connections, and social contexts, as well as on the cognitive and linguistic processes that have dominated research and practice. Role of Social Interaction in Literacy DevelopmentIn recent years, there has been emphasis on understanding the role of social interaction in the development of literacy and other problem-solving domains, but individual researchers have construed social interaction in diverse ways, as evidenced in the chapters in this book. Some theorists and educators emphasize the value of expert collaborators guiding children to do more complex problem solving than they would engage in on their own (Collins, Brown, and Newman, 1989). Other researchers emphasize the dialogic nature of thought in the context of social interaction and children's active engagement when working with peers (Daiute and Dalton, 1993;Dyson, 1989;Nystrand and Gamoran, 1991; Nystrand, Greene, and Wiemelt, in press). In this chapter, we focus on the contrast between social reproduction as characterized in a teacher's modeling of expert composing strategies and social construction as characterized by collaboration among young novice writers in an urban setting. Such a contrast offers insights about relationships between social formations of mind and other factors within individuals, like developmental and affective factors, which typically have not been integrated into cognitive developmental or social interactionist theories.Expertise. One of Vygotsky's major contributions to educational research has been the concept of "zone of proximal development," which is the distance between a child's actual level of development as assessed when working individuall...