Karin Aronsson

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.

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.

Cats, Dogs, and Sweets in the Clinical Negotiation of Reality: On Politeness and Coherence in Pediatric Discourse.

Cats, dogs, and sweets in the clinical negotiation of reality. On politeness and coherence in pediatric discourse.

Growing up monolingual in a bilingual community: The Quichua revitalization paradox

The present investigation concerns language ideology and language practices in relation to a language shift - from Quichua-Spanish bilingualism to Spanish monolingualisin - that seems to be under w ...

Family politics in children's play directives

The present study focuses on childrens role play directives as displays of gender stereotypes and power hierarchies in family life. Studies on politeness have primarily focused on directives at the mitigation end of a politeness continuum. The present study has particularly addressed the aggravation end of the continuum and, as predicted, family role play was rich in aggravations. A specific type of escalation, called threat-tell sequences, showed how the children successively moved from a metapragmatic level to a pragmatic level, and at times ultimately to a level of embodied action. Focusing in depth on childrens embodied role play directives in face-to-face interaction, this study shows how politeness models need to be expanded in order to account for aggravated moves and paradoxical communication.

Generational positions at family dinner : Food morality and social order

This article concerns generation and food morality, drawing on video recordings of dinners in Swedish middle-class families. A detailed analysis of affect displays during one family dinner extends ...

Relational Rationality and Children’s Interview Responses

Children’s interview responses are often read monologically, as mirror reflections of their spontaneous thinking. In contrast, analyses of alignments and collaboration imply a dialogical approach. We argue that in a dialogical analysis, children’s interview responses should be read in terms of a relational rationality. Against the backdrop of such a rationality, ‘immature’ responses can be understood in terms of children’s desire to please the interviewer, and by their rational desire to align themselves with their co-participants. In contrast to the scientific rationality of Grice’s conversational maxims, relational rationality is instead discussed in terms of social relations.

The Courtroom Hearing as a Middle Ground: Speech Accommodation by Lawyers and Defendants

A criminal court trial may be characterised in terms of interactional asymmetry and by largely conflicting goals and interests on the part of the principal actors. It is also an arena where different linguistic varieties and modes of interaction meet. In this paper, we analyse Swedish court hearings as a middle ground where actors, defendants as well as legal professionals, attenuate a number of differences in their respective discourse styles, e.g. as regards vocabulary and information density. Despite what defendants claim in interviews, they themselves attenuate their colloquial jargons when they speak to judges and lawyers in courts. At the other side, legal professionals routinely change their language considerably as they move from the monological phases of the trials to the rather informal dialogical phases (hearings), in which they directly interact with defendants. Furthermore, professionals are also shown to accommodate to the linguistic styles of individual defendants (as regards level of information density). Results are interpreted in terms of speech accommodation theory and provide support for the validity of the theory for authentic interaction in real social life.

Gaming and Territorial Negotiations in Family Life.

This article examines territorial negotiations concerning gaming, drawing on video recordings of gaming practices in middle-class families. It explores how private vs public gaming space was co-construed by children and parents in front of the screen as well as through conversations about games. Game equipment was generally located in public places in the homes, which can be understood in terms of parents’ surveillance of their children, on the one hand, and actual parental involvement, on the other. Gaming space emerged in the interplay between game location, technology and practices, which blurred any fixed boundaries between public and private, place and space, as well as traditional age hierarchies.

Conarration and voice in family therapy: Voicing, devoicing and orchestration

This study explores conarration in family therapy talk. Story-telling plays a crucial r öle in social encounters äs an interactional resource and äs an important way ofdisplaying ones seif and ones version ofthe past. Family life is a rieh arenafor conarration in that families repeatedly have reasons to discuss andevaluate everyday events in which several members have taken pari, negotiating the family s joint biography. Multiparty narration is analyzed in a family therapy case involving conflicting mother-son andhusbandwife alliances. On a discourse level, it is shown how participants voice each others complaints, and how voices are nested and mixed in way s which perpetuate family battles, turning duels into multiparty fights. Narration is discussed in terms of sequential moves, legitimizing same side stories and de-authorizing Opponent side stories. The therapists talk is analyzed in terms of what is here called orchestration, that is way s of making participants listen and talk to each other. In a Situation ofopen and hidden polemics, an important pari of therapists work is to separate family members distinci voices.