Child-addressed talk as an interactional resource
The management of (non-)seriousness in talk between nursery schoolteachers and parents
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.23594Keywords:
nursery schoolteachers, parents, child-addressed talk, participation roles, seriousness and non-seriousness of the reportAbstract
When parents come to pick up their children at a nursery school, teachers give them the day’s report in the presence of the children. Although the teachers mostly address their reports to the parent of a child, they occasionally address the child. This conversation analytic study documents the use of child-addressed talk (CAT) in nursery schoolteacher–parent interactions. I demonstrate that the use or non-use of CAT is a resource that a nursery schoolteacher may use to assign different participation roles to the child, and, by so doing, to forecast the (non-)seriousness of the incipient report. I further suggest that what amounts to a serious or non-serious matter is subject to interactional negotiation and that CAT is one of many resources that adult participants can use to negotiate and achieve agreement on the matter. Data are drawn from a corpus of Japanese conversations between nursery schoolteachers and parents recorded in Tokyo.
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