The aim of this paper is to presente a critical review of the so called interactionist approaches to language acquisition and also of more or less recente statments about their failure as explanatory proposals. The first step in the direction of such evaluation is to clarify the issues , by pointing out the heterogeneous nature of the theorectical enterprises conflated under the term ‘interactionism’. Each of those lines of research is subsequently discussed in the light of their implicit or explicit commitment to their constructivist counterpart, or, in other words, in the light of the questions as to how they can account for the child`s construction of linguistic subsystems at diferente levels of their functioning.