Child-initiated informings and conversational participation in a bilingual preschool

The study investigates how children in a bilingual kindergarten in Sweden initiate conversations with kindergarten teachers through their own information contributions, and how this contributes to the development of their interaction skills. The study also investigates how children navigate institutional expectations of linguistic interaction by selecting the ‘right language’ for the situation. The research questions are:

1. How do children initiate conversations with kindergarten teachers in a bilingual kindergarten through their own information contributions?
2. In what ways do children demonstrate interaction skills through these conversational initiatives, especially within frameworks that require language-specific choices?

The study thus investigates both children’s information practices and how these actions contribute to linguistic and social learning in an institutional, bilingual context.

The results show that children actively use initiatives such as information contributions to gain the kindergarten teachers’ attention and establish themselves as competent participants. By adopting language choices and themes adapted to adult preferences, children demonstrate meta-linguistic awareness, especially in the choice of language in different situations. The results indicate that children’s information initiatives promote their social and linguistic skills by developing narrative competence and recipient-oriented communication.

The study uses an ethnographic design with video observation to collect data. The researchers have documented 80 hours of natural interactions between children and kindergarten teachers in a bilingual kindergarten. The data material is analysed using conversation analysis, with a particular focus on children’s multimodal expressions and how kindergarten teachers support children’s information initiatives.

Anatoli, O., & Cekaite, A. (2023). Child-initiated informings and conversational participation in a bilingual preschool. Journal of Pragmatics, 217, 33–48.