Research on Children and Social Interaction

‘Let’s play crocodiles’

Maryanne Theobald — 2023-02-23

School playgrounds are spaces where children play with peers in organised games that have pre-existing rules and procedures for game play, and made-up games that are improvised in the moment. The ways children go about making up games have not been well documented and may be overlooked in situ due to the minimal supervision of school playgrounds. This study investigates how children mobilise and constrain their own game participation using improvised rule proposals and directives. Turn-by-turn analysis of
the video recorded interactions of children (5–9 years) during lunch recess in an Australian school shows how children competently create and negotiate a game they called ‘crocodiles’. This ethnomethodological approach using conversation analysis highlights how children propose, challenge, or resist rules, to ensure or delay their ongoing involvement, or to influence the participation of others. Analyses identify how children negotiated their play and the actions of others as they recruited members and negotiated the play, mapped game play, made claims and further negotiations, and monitored the rule infringements of players. Identifying how children assemble their talk and actions as they create games informs educators of the interactional resources required for children’s participation in playground activities. Opportunities for practising these social skills within and away from adult supervision are particularly important as children interact in school playgrounds.

Children’s embodied practices for organizing participation in pretend play in an inclusive kindergarten

Friederike Kern — 2023-02-23

This paper uses a microanalysis of naturally occurring interactions to uncover how pre-school-aged autistic and non-autistic children organize their participation in pretend play. The analysis draws on video recordings of children and a teacher during two playing time sessions in an inclusive nursery school. It explores differences in the embodied practices with which the children attempt to gain access to play material and take possession of it. Findings show how children use environmental resources (e.g. space, objects) for their purposes while adapting to relevant situative contingencies; they also suggest that autistic children can be thorough observers of unfolding interactions who possess the ability to transform and adopt their own embodied practices. Comparative analysis thus provides empirical support for the potential achievements of inclusive education.

‘I’m just imitating the idiot’

Ann-Carita Evaldsson — 2023-02-23

This study examines how exclusionary acts of status degradation are performed through embodied stances and pejorative category ascriptions in the midst of a situated game activity where two boys align in mockful stances and stylized enactments towards a targeted boy. Drawing on a multimodal interactional approach to stance and membership categorization combined with sociolinguistic work on indexicality and identity, it shows how the cumulative patterning of derogatory stances index a deviant gender identity for the targeted boy. While the target is repeatedly cast as ‘abnormal’ and an ‘outsider’ by attributing (non-)boyhood features as ‘incompetence’ and ‘cowardness’, the two boys’ elevate own positions and display shared commitments to themselves as ‘real (warrior) boys’.

‘Yes, we’re done’ – ‘except Ricardo’

Daniel Müller-Feldmeth — 2023-02-23

Oral argumentations among peers always involve negotiation of group identity. By means of multimodal analysis, this case study shows how children mobilize interactional space, physical surroundings, as well as verbal and paraverbal resources for the embodied enactment of in- and exclusion, of affiliation and disaffiliation, and the negotiation of group identity. We argue that the processing of interpersonal relationships constitutes a crucial aspect of oral argumentation skills and that in particular multiparty interaction provides an indispensable source for the study of oral argumentation and its acquisition. The example analysed is a conversation among four elementary schoolchildren (8 years) working on a cooperative decision task. The conversation is characterized by the consolidation of a 3 versus 1 constellation, ultimately preventing the group from reaching a consensual decision.

Exclusion and inclusion in peer groups

Sara Goico — 2023-02-23

We consider practices of exclusion and ridicule in peer groups in two distinct cultural contexts and with participants with distinct sensory access to the world. First, we consider exclusionary acts in a multiethnic girls’ peer group spanning fourth- to sixth-graders in a progressive Southern California school in the United States. We then consider interactions in a peer group consisting of deaf and hearing peers in a fourth-grade classroom in Iquitos, Peru. Our work uses ethnographic fieldwork, including videotaping, to make available the moment-by-moment interactive processes through which exclusion and ridicule are accomplished. This research also constitutes one of very few comparative studies of exclusionary practices, making comparisons across cultural contexts with respect to sensorial access to the world.

Effective Task Instruction in the First Year of School: What Teachers and Children Do

Marjolein Deunk — 2023-02-23

Effective Task Instruction in the First Year of School: What Teachers and Children Do Ilana Mushin, Rod Gardner, and Claire Gourlay (Routledge, 2022)

Editorial

Amanda Bateman — 2023-02-23

Children’s embodied and linguistic organization of peer inclusion and exclusion

Polly Björk-Willén — 2023-02-23