No abstract

This paper reports on how teachers, from different cities in Brazil, used groups on Facebook and how communication between teachers and students was affected by using such groups. This study is framed under the Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) perspective, and is conceived from a methodological background that invites participants to collaborate during the research. We examined posts from the groups on Facebook from February 2013 to June 2014 by a qualitative approach, together with coding the open-ended qualitative data and comparing their distribution, and analyzed responses to a questionnaire for teachers by the end of the research. Our findings suggest the teachers used the groups for different purposes, which led to an improvement in communication between teachers and students-online and in-classroom-and in students' engagement in the classrooms.

Children’s sociometric status refers to their position within the peer group and plays a major role in their future social development. It is therefore important to investigate factors that are related to it. To date, little attention has been paid to the potential role of oral communicative competence. The present study investigated sociometric group differences in the level of oral communicative competence in a sample of N = 570 children in early childhood education. Sociometric status was measured using a nomination procedure. Based on peer nominations, children were categorized into five sociometric groups: (1) popular (generally well‐liked), (2) rejected (generally disliked), (3) neglected (low visibility and neither liked nor disliked), (4) controversial (high visibility and both liked and disliked), and (5) average (at or about the mean on both likability and visibility). Children’s level of oral communicative competence was assessed with the Nijmegen Test for Pragmatics. Results of multi‐level analyses revealed significant sociometric group differences: children who were rejected or neglected by their peers exhibited lower levels of oral communicative competence than average children. Based on these findings, teachers in early childhood education are encouraged to pay more explicit attention to the promotion of their pupils’ oral communicative competence.

Being rejected by peers has devastating consequences for a child's future social-cognitive development. It is therefore important to investigate factors that contribute to childhood peer rejection. In doing so, the present review specifically focused on sociometric status, a concept that refers to a child's position within the peer group (e.g., liked or disliked). Although previous studies indicated that children's ability to communicate effectively might partly determine their sociometric status, much was still unclear about this relation. Therefore, in the present review, a total of 25 studies into the relation between children's (aged 1 to 12 years) level of oral communicative competence and their sociometric status was systematically reviewed. Results generally pointed to a significant relation between the two variables. Specifically, rejected children communicate less responsive compared with popular children. However, several gaps in previous research were identified, resulting in five recommendations for future studies. First, the complexity of the construct of oral communicative competence asks for an approach in which multiple methods are combined (i.e., mixed methods). Second, future studies should be conducted in non-western countries as well to study possible cross-cultural differences. Third, as the majority of researches were small-scale exploratory studies, future research should include larger samples in order to generalize the findings outside the sample. Fourth, future studies should adopt longitudinal and experimental designs to investigate the direction of the relation of interest. And finally, as previous research showed that the interactional context, gender, and age might influence the relation between oral communicative competence and sociometric status, future studies could take these factors into account.

The present study investigated the relation between oral communicative competence and peer rejection in early childhood education, as well as gender differences in this relation. Participants were N = 447 children aged 4-6 years. Children's level of oral communicative competence was measured using the Nijmegen Test for Pragmatics and a sociometric method with peer nominations was used to assess their level of peer rejection. Regression analyses revealed that, after controlling for gender, age, and SES, oral communicative competence accounted for unique variance in peer rejection and was negatively related to the extent to which children were rejected by peers: children with poorer oral communicative competence experienced higher levels of peer rejection. No gender differences in this relation were found. Future research demonstrating the causal effect of oral communicative competence on peer rejection can provide early childhood education teachers who try to prevent or reduce peer rejection a strong argument to focus on the promotion of children's oral communicative competence.