Amelia Church

Preference Organisation and Peer Disputes : How Young Children Resolve Conflict

Contents: Introduction Defining child conflict Conversation analysis Peer disputes Dispute outcomes Preference and dispute outcomes How to resolve disputes Appendix References Index.

Opportunities for learning during storybook reading at preschool

Research in teacher-child interaction in early childhood settings typically focuses on the teacher’s talk, with a particular interest in the types of questions teachers use. This paper is interested in how teachers respond where children initiate the interaction, to explore the opportunities children may, or may not, have to get to the center of child-centered learning. Examples are provided here of young children’s self-selected questions or comments during shared bookreading and the responses made by teachers. The data illustrate that even though children demonstrate communicative competence in taking timely and appropriate turns in the interaction, the relevance of this talk is determined wholly by the teacher. Implications of extending children’s contribution to the talk-in-interaction are considered in relation to opportunities for learning.

Teachers as Brokers

This paper explores a small sample of Australian early childhood teachers’ perceptions of the rights-based concepts participation and agency . We recognise and reconcile some of the perceived tensions between the debates on participation and protection and how these play out in the teaching and learning spaces of early childhood education. Teachers’ reflections on these concepts in relation to practice are highly significant to the field, connecting the concepts of children’s rights to the reality of everyday practices in early childhood education and care settings. As brokers or conduits to participation in early learning environments, a better understanding of teacher’s professional stance enables opportunities for young children to be better heard. An understanding of complexities and relatedness within these settings, can lead to more consistent and clear policy implementation.

Conditional Threats in Young Children's Peer Interaction

Purpose – In this chapter, the use and organization of conditional threats are analysed in relation to preschool childrens disputes. Methodology – Using conversation analysis, naturally occurring examples of childrens threats observed in preschool classrooms demonstrate how conditional threats are placed, used and analysed by children in their talk-in-interaction. Findings – The function of threats – specifically in terms of the outcome of childrens disputes – cannot be classified by the content of the inducement. ‘You can’t come to my birthday party’, for example, is commonly heard in young childrens discourse, but this threat is implicated in both the resolution and dissipation (abandonment) of dispute episodes. Accordingly, the meaning and analysability of threats is explored with respect to their relative value and their practical rationality. Research limitations – This small data set presents the opportunity for the phenomena of childrens threats to studied further in a larger collection. Originality/value of chapter – This chapter makes a unique contribution to the study of language and social interaction by illustrating young childrens competent use of conditional threats in the closings of peer disputes.

Children’s Knowledge-in-Interaction: An Introduction

Understanding what children know and how they display knowledge is at the centre of education. Interactions with young children are not only central to learning in early childhood settings and schools, as interactions with parents, siblings, families and friends are the fundamental site for children’s learning about how to be in the world. We—the editors and authors in this collection—are most interested in how it is that children manage to navigate their social lives, including the classroom, and how they and others respond to their demonstrable knowledge of the world. The title of this collection Children’s knowledge-in-interaction captures our preoccupation with understanding what children know by paying close attention to the turn-by-turn, unfolding and collaborative, nature of talk. The illumination of intersubjectivity provided by talk-in-interaction is why we are all drawn to the methodology and method of conversation analysis in our research.

Supporting children to resolve disputes

Teacher intervention in children’s disputes most commonly features cessation strategies, despite evidence showing the value of modelling problem-solving behaviours. Existing research has categorized strategies used by teachers in early childhood settings, but in this article we aim to illustrate how these practices are realized. Using the method of conversation analysis, we are able to show how children respond to different interventions, and in particular, how successful modelling of problem solving can be achieved with 4-year-old children. The extracts in this article make a case for the close study of teacher–child interactions and demonstrate how educators can support children to resolve their own disputes.

Children’s use of objects in an early years playground

ABSTRACT Early childhood research has investigated children’s use of objects largely focusing on cognitive and motor development. Yet members of a particular culture, such as young children’s peer groups, use objects that have cultural relevance as conversational items, as a means to interacting with other members of the group. This article illustrates the role of objects in children’s everyday lives by demonstrating how children orient to objects as a way of approaching an existing group. The findings are taken from a study using conversation analysis (CA) to explore playground interactions between four-year-old children in a Welsh primary school. The analysis reveals that children systematically use objects as access tools to initiate interactions with each other, thereby using immediately available resources – and exploiting the sequential rules of talk – to co-construct the social organisation of the playground.

Some trouble with repair: Conversations between children with cochlear implants and hearing peers:

This article investigates differences in pragmatic abilities between children who have cochlear implants and their hearing peers. Recordings of 10-minute conversations between 10 children with cochlear implants (children with age-equivalent language scores) and a hearing peer were transcribed. Conversation analysis provides insights into interactional troubles not evident in broader measures of number of turns, requests for clarification, topic initiation and so on used in earlier studies. How the children go about repair proves of particular interest; other-initiated repair that prompts the speaker to repeat the prior utterance is, not surprisingly, more commonly produced by the children who have cochlear implants. The key contribution of this article, however, is to detail examples where children with cochlear implants choose not to initiate repair of an error made by their hearing friend. The discussion not only highlights the interactional cost of initiating repair, but also demonstrates that not doing repair can cause a breakdown in conversation.

Hearing Loss and Cochlear Implantation

Research has shown that cochlear implants have become a popular option for many families who have young children with severe-to-profound hearing loss. Findings show that while improvements in spoken language outcomes for children and young people who use cochlear implants are evident, there are large individual differences in performance. Studies that investigate spoken language outcomes for children with hearing loss typically report results based on measures of receptive and/or expressive language or in the subsystems of syntax, semantics, morphology or phonology. There is less research that focuses on the social use of language, that is, the specific pragmatic skills that are challenging for children and young people with hearing loss. Further research is needed to detail the context in which children develop pragmatic competencies in order to inform clinical practice.

Mathematics Knowledge in Early Childhood: Intentional Teaching in the Third Turn

Research that focuses on the quality of interactions in early childhood settings has shown the importance of attuned responses to facilitate children’s learning. This chapter details the practices of teachers designed to provide opportunities for children to demonstrate, explore and extend their mathematics knowledge. In other words, what intentional teaching looks like, and how it can be achieved in practice. Video-recorded observations of play-based numeracy activities across six early childhood education settings illustrate opportunities for learning and the importance of teacher talk, which is both evaluative and productive in facilitating participation of children with varying competencies.