Asta Cekaite

Repetition and Joking in Children’s Second Language Conversations: Playful Recyclings in an Immersion Classroom

Repetition is often associated with traditional teaching drills. However, it has been documented how repetitions are exploited by learners themselves (Duff, 2000). In a study of immersion classroom conversations, it was found that playful recyclings were recurrent features of young learners’ second language repertoires. Such joking events were identified on the basis of the participants’ displayed amusement, and they often involved activity-based jokes (Lampert, 1996) and meta pragmatic play, that is, joking about how or by whom something is said. Two types of recyclings: intertextual play and role appropriations were both important features in informal classroom entertainment and in the formation of a community of learners (cf. Rogoff, 1990). In a broad sense, both types of joking contained subversive elements in that they created play zones or ‘time-out’ (cf. Goffman, 1959; Jefferson, 1996) within classroom activities. Moreover, role appropriations were subversive in that they inverted classroom hierarchies.

Shepherding the child: embodied directive sequences in parent-child interactions

Abstract The present study explores how directives are constituted in and through situated verbal, bodily, and spatial practices. The foci are parental directives requesting routine family tasks to be carried out in an immediate situational context and necessitating the childs locomotion from one place to another (e.g., to take a bath, brush his/her teeth). As documented, such directive sequences were designed with what is here called parental shepherding moves, that is, “techniques of the body” (Mauss, Economy and Society 2: 70–88, 1973 [1935]) that monitor the childs body for compliance. Body twist, a form of tactile intervention, was deployed to terminate the childs prior activity and initiate a relevant activity by perceptually reorienting the child in the lived architecture of the home. Tactile and non-tactile steering constituted means for monitoring and controlling the direction, pace, and route of the childs locomotion. Overall, these embodied directives served as multifunctional cultural tools that scaffolded the child into reflexive awareness of the dialogic and embodied characteristics of social action and accountability.

Activity contracts and directives in everyday family politics

In theorizing on family life, children’s agency is a feature of a modern type of family, marked by free choice and inter-generational negotiations rather than parental authority. A video ethnography of Swedish everyday family life documents directive sequences and inter-generational negotiations, including what is here called activity contracts: agreements that form a type of inter-generational account work around target activities (e.g. cleaning one’s room). Within local family politics, contracts and revised contracts emerge as parts of such account work. The analyses focus on how contracts emerge within successive downgradings and upgradings of parental directives. Activity contracts regulate mutual rights and obligations, invoking family rule statements and local moral order, drawing on an array of verbal and nonverbal resources, ranging from parents’ mitigated requests and children’s time bargaining to nonverbal escape strategies and gentle shepherding.

Peer group interactions in multilingual educational settings: Co-constructing social order and norms for language use

The present study explores peer group interactions in early multilingual educational settings, specifically focusing on children’s language-related episodes. Highlighting the multifaceted work of these interactional practices, it demonstrates in detail how children’s corrective actions, targeting, assessing and criticizing of the other’s language use were utilized in building the peer group identities and relations, while simultaneously indexing local norms for conduct and language use. Designed as outright disagreements with the prior speaker, corrections highlighted the contrast between the recipient’s error and the speaker’s remedy and entailed (a) the disagreement with the prior speaker (e.g. linguistic polarity marker ‘no’), (b) the explicit identification of the trouble source (‘this is not x’) and (c) the instruction as to the correct replacement (‘this is x’). Similarly, word searches in the peer group were resolved so as to index the asymmetry in knowledge between the peers. In the production of corrections, the children displayed and recognized the relevance of appropriate use of the lingua franca (e.g. Swedish) as part of their situated production of local social order. Language expertise was an issue for negotiations and redefinitions in multilingual peer group’s interactions and was one of the factors organizing social relations in multilingual educational settings.

Language Maintenance in a Multilingual Family: Informal Heritage Language Lessons in Parent-Child Interactions.

Abstract The present study explores language socialization patterns in a Persian-Kurdish family in Sweden and examines how “one-parent, one-language” family language policies are instantiated and negotiated in parent–child interactions. The data consist of video-recordings and ethnographic observations of family interactions, as well as interviews. Detailed interactional analysis is employed to investigate parental language maintenance efforts and the child’s agentive orientation in relation to the recurrent interactional practices through which parents attempt to enforce a monolingual, heritage language “context” for parent–child interaction. We examine the interactional trajectories that develop in parents’ requests for translation that target the focus child’s (a7-year-old girl’s) lexical mixings. These practices resembled formal language instruction: The parents suspended the ongoing conversational activity, requested that the child translate the problematic item, modeled and assessed her language use. The instructional exchanges were asymmetrically organized: the parents positioned themselves as “experts”, insisting on the child’s active participation, whereas the child’s (affectively aggravated) resistance was frequent, and the parents recurrently accommodated the child by terminating the language instruction. The study argues that an examination of children’s agency, and the social dynamics characterizing parental attempts to shape children’s heritage language use, can provide significant insights into the conditions for language maintenance

Collaborative corrections with spelling control: Digital resources and peer assistance

The present study has explored how pairs of students deployed digital tools (spelling software) as resources in spontaneously occurring corrections of spelling errors. Drawing on the sociocultural theory of learning and ethnomethodological (Conversation Analytic) insights into social interaction, it has identified a range of consistent practices and uses of the spelling tools that were emergent in the everyday educational activities. As demonstrated, technology-assisted error corrections constituted a complex situation, where a number of socioculturally significant factors (goals of the task, properties of the software, and physical access to computer applications) shaped the trajectories of joint work. The present analysis shows in detail how the students approached the visually manifested language production errors by using two kinds of software resources, spelling lists, and a diagnostic tool. The inherent conceptual distinctions, characteristic of these tools, configured joint interpretative work and efforts to correct the errors in different ways. Recurrently, the students’ technology-based corrections were designed as autonomous, stepwise, locally improvised problem solutions, which were subsequently submitted for the evaluation of the diagnostic software. Overall, the study shows that the under-specification of the software’s instructions opened a space for the students’ creative engagement. The potentials of joint spelling software-assisted corrections for collaborative learning are discussed.

The Coordination of Talk and Touch in Adults’ Directives to Children: Touch and Social Control

Adults sometimes accompany the directives they issue to children about their actions and movements with bodily contact (for example, shoving, guiding, or pushing). This article explores the interactional uses and meanings of such combinations of spoken directive and bodily contact that involves touch in data from families and primary educational settings in Sweden. The focus is on how the timing and coordination of haptics (communicative acts of touch), speech, and contextual factors produce communicative meanings. Findings reveal how touch and talk are synchronized to achieve the child’s compliance to directives. Laminated (that is, multimodal) directives combine concurrent use of imperatives with adults’ own haptic acts, signaling and enforcing the onset and/or trajectory of the required movement. They constitute the prevalent pattern of use, as compared to the use of control touch without accompanying verbalization. Haptic control formats are usually responsive to the child recipient’s noncompliant responses. The data are in Swedish with English translation.

Tattling and dispute resolution : Moral order, emotions, and embodiment in teacher-mediated disputes of young second language learners

Introduction : disputes in everyday life : social and moral orders of children and young people / Susan Danby, Maryanne Theobald -- Category relations, omnirelevance, and childrens disputes / St ...

Language policies in play: Learning ecologies in multilingual preschool interactions among peers and teachers

Abstract In this study we argue that a focus on language learning ecologies, that is, situations for participation in various communicative practices, can shed light on the intricate processes through which minority children develop or are constrained from acquiring cultural and linguistic competencies (here, of a majority language). The analysis draws on a language socialization approach to examine the micro-level contexts of an immigrant child’s preschool interactions with peers and teachers, and the interplay between these and macro-level language and educational policies. It was found that, in contrast to institutional and curricular policy aspirations concerning the positive potentials of children’s play as a site associated with core learning affordances, the language learning ecology created in the multilingual peer group interactions was limited. Social relations in the peer group, the novice’s marginal social position, and the child’s rudimentary knowledge of the lingua franca, Swedish, precluded her from gaining access to shared peer play activities. The current study thus corroborates prior research showing that peer interactions in second language settings may pose a challenge to children who have not already achieved some competence in the majority language and that more support and interactions with the teachers can be useful.

Siblings as Language Socialization Agents in Bilingual Families

ABSTRACT The present study examines the siblings’ contribution to shaping the language practices and language environment of immigrant families. The data consist of interviews, observations, and video recordings of everyday family interactions and sibling play in five Iranian families residing in Sweden. Detailed interaction analyses show that siblings targeted various aspects of each other’s language use (heritage languages, Swedish, and English). They corrected each other’s language use and choices and requested and provided language instructions when language-related problems occurred. However, the main language of siblings’ talk was Swedish. The siblings addressed the multifaceted linguistic demands of Swedish society and helped to develop each other’s multiple languages. Simultaneously, however, by primarily using Swedish, they were contributing to language shift. The study broadens the focus of family language policy studies (i.e., parents’ views on family language planning or parent-child dyadic interactions) and adds to the underresearched area of family bilingualism and heritage language maintenance.