This thesis investigates children’s participation in and opportunities for bilingual learning in the setting of a Swedish–English early childhood education and care institution (i.e., preschool, Swedish: förskola). Theoretically, the present thesis draws on the co-operative action approach and applies the method of multimodal conversation analysis. The data consists of 80 hours of video-recordings and ethnographic observations of mundane practices in a bilingual preschool in Sweden. The thesis aims to investigate how children's participation and influence manifest in a bilingual preschool, and how teachers and children collaboratively accomplish bilingual education across a broad range of mundane institutional encounters. The thesis consists of three studies based on the following specific questions: How do children initiate interactions with teachers, and how are such initiatives recognized by teachers and other children? How do mundane practices lead to the exploration of word meaning in two languages, and how are emergent vocabulary-focused sequences interactionally organized in the bilingual ECEC setting? How do teachers’ verbal and embodied instructions during mundane tasks and children’s participation in teacher-led enskilment practices constitute opportunities for bilingual learning? The empirical studies present the following findings: opportunities for bilingual teaching and learning are distributed throughout mundane, careoriented encounters; children’s bilingualism is observable in their daily interactions with a variety of conversation partners within the context of the local institutional language policy. Specifically, the studies demonstrate (i) how children issued informings to initiate a conversation with teachers and, by doing so, created situations in which they could practice their bilingual and interactional skills; (ii) how children and teachers collaboratively engaged in the discovery of bilingual meanings in multiparty talk; and (iii) how teachers modelled language use when guiding children in the accomplishment of practical tasks and how children’s embodied actions demonstrated their understanding of bilingual instructions. The thesis contributes to research on bilingual early childhood education by demonstrating how children and teachers use multimodal semiotic resources in dialogical, mutually transformative interactions, and how these interactions create opportunities for children’s language learning. With the focus on teachers and children’s collaborative practices in situ, this thesis highlights children’s participation and agency as co-operative action.

Denna sammanläggningsavhandling handlar om barns deltagande och möjligheter till tvåspråkigt lärande i en svensk-engelska förskola. Teoretiskt bygger avhandlingen på ett perspektiv på samskapande i utveckling av tvåspråkighet och tillämpar multimodal konversationsanalys. Data består av 80 timmar videoetnografiska inspelningar av vardagliga aktiviteter som äger rum i en tvåspråkig förskola i Sverige. Avhandlingen syftar till att undersöka hur barns delaktighet och inflytande manifesterar sig i en tvåspråkig förskola, och hur vardagliga institutionella interaktioner i förskolan bidrar till barns tvåspråkiga lärande. Avhandlingen består av tre separata empiriska delstudier som utgår från följande specifika forskningsfrågor: Hur initierar barn interaktioner med lärare och hur uppmärksammas och bemöts sådana initiativ av lärare och andra barn? Hur leder vardagliga aktiviteter till att utforska ordets betydelse på två språk och hur är ordförrådsfokuserade sekvenser organiserade i den tvåspråkiga förskolemiljön? Vilka möjligheter till tvåspråkigt lärande skapas genom lärares verbala och förkroppsligade instruktioner samt barns deltagande i vardagliga uppgifter? De empiriska delstudierna presenterar följande resultat: möjligheter till tvåspråkig undervisning och lärande fördelas genom vardagliga, omsorgsinriktade aktiviteter; barns tvåspråkighet är observerbar i deras dagliga interaktioner med olika samtalspartners samt i relation till förskolans språkpolicy. Studierna visar (i) hur barn genom sina sätt att inleda samtal med lärare möjliggjorde att de kunde utveckla sina tvåspråkiga och interaktionella färdigheter; (ii) hur barn och lärare genom samarbete upptäckte tvåspråkiga betydelser i flerpartssamtal; och (iii) hur lärare modellerade språkanvändning när de vägledde barn i att utföra praktiska uppgifter och hur barns förkroppsligade handlingar visade deras förståelse för tvåspråkiga instruktioner. Avhandlingen bidrar till forskning om barns deltagande i den tvåspråkiga institutionella miljön genom att synliggöra hur barn och lärare använder multimodala semiotiska resurser i dialogiska interaktioner, och hur dessa interaktioner skapar möjligheter för barns språkinlärning. Med fokus på lärar- och barnsamverkan belyser denna avhandling barns delaktighet och handlingsfrihet genom samskapande aktiviteter.

Institutions of early childhood education and care (ECEC) constitute an important environment for children's learning and development, yet little is known about language-supportive interactions in ECEC settings beyond teacher-led educational activities or children's peer play. This study on a bilingual Swedish-English preschool draws attention to teacher-child interactions during transitional activities as a space for situated learning and enskilment in practical tasks, e. g., dressing or cleaning. Specifically, the study describes how teachers and young children (1-2- and 3-4-year-olds) participate in embodied instructional exchanges amid a one-teacher/onelanguage policy. The study is based on multimodal conversation analysis of video-recordings collected during ethnographic fieldwork in Sweden. The analysis reveals the teachers' embodied and verbal strategies for instructing and scaffolding children's actions, socializing the children in the institutional interactional routines, and modeling linguistic patterns in two languages. The analysis describes how young children participate in the enskilment practices as agentive members in the preschool as a community of practice and a language learning ecology. The study supports research on the connection between children's participation, the development of embodied skills, and language learning, and highlights the pedagogical value of mundane encounters in ECEC.

This collaborative article explores child-centredness as a theoretical and methodological concept by asking what it means to centre children in research. The collaborative format offers a heterogeneity of voices on the concept as the contributing authors write, critically and creatively, from a range of different interdisciplinary research perspectives. Writing from the departure point of the key role of child-centred approaches within the field, including recent discussions concerning the need to decentre children/childhood, the goal is to spur and contribute to discussions on the possibilities and challenges of the concept, as well as new ways of approaching it.

This piece is a collective exploration by seven doctoral researchers in Child Studies, who discuss notions of listening to children and young people in a Swedish context. We approach different aspects of listening in research and in practices such as education, psychiatry, and social work. The discussions in this collective writing are an invitation for continuous reflections about the contexts where listening to children is done, its challenges and possibilities.

This paper examines spontaneous conversations about word meaning in a bilingual preschool in Sweden. This qualitative empirical study is grounded in an ethnomethodological theoretical framework and contributes to research on multilingualism by using a sociocultural lens to examine mundane linguistic experiences of very young children who learn to speak in more than one language. The data comprise video-recordings of naturally occurring interactions among teachers and children in a Swedish-English preschool with a one teacher-one language policy. The data were collected during ethnographic fieldwork in an urban area in Sweden. Approached with multimodal interactional analysis, the data draw attention to teachers’ everyday didactics, including their professional strategies for initiating spontaneous vocabulary work and orchestrating multiparty engagement in the collaborative discovery of meaning, and children’s participation. The analysis discusses strategies for providing word definitions and demonstrates mundane institutional contexts outside of the classroom setting where such interactions were possible. Both teachers and children engaged in vocabulary exploration by using words in a situated, locally meaningful way. The study highlights that the teachers followed the preschool’s language policy and embodied monolingual identities, while orienting to children as multilingual learners and supporting their language development.

This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, “un-closure” , and uncertainty in order to investigate the (e)motions and complexities of being either a child or a researcher. The theoretical and methodological processes presented here offer an opportunity to shake the ground on which individual researchers stand by raising questions about scientific inspiration, theoretical and methodological productivity, and thinking through focusing on process, play, and collaboration. The effect of this is a questioning of the singular academic ‘I’ by exploring and showing what a plural ‘I’ can look like. It is about what the multiplicity of voice can offer research in a highly individualistic time. The article allows the reader to follow and watch the unconventional trial-and-error path of the ongoing-ness of exploring theories and methods together as a research community via methods of drama, palimpsest, and fictionary.

This paper explores children's interactional competence in the context of bilingual early childhood education, looking specifically at how very young children initiate conversations with teachers by informing them about something interesting and new. Video recordings collected from ethnographic fieldwork in a Swedish–English preschool are investigated from the conversation analytic perspective, paying particular attention to multimodal aspects of naturally-occurring interactions. The analysis reveals that in initiating informings aimed at teachers in a multiparty institutional setting, children practice their bilingual skills in turn-taking and recipient design, and present their topic as relevant and coherent within the local material and conversational context. In so doing, children navigate institutional constraints on participation, secure teachers' recipiency, and establish themselves as knowledgeable speakers. Child-initiated participation in multiparty institutional settings provides a co-operative, transformative social process that constitutes an essential affordance for children's development of interactional competence in a bilingual educational context.

Novel genres of participatory media often criticized as info- or edutainment are regularly used in developing countries for pursuing liberal ideologies. Conversation and discourse analysis applied to unedited footage of such genre from East Africa reveals how its format and organization introduce participants and audience to the political role of active citizens. A detailed analysis of a selected episode on homosexuality—a crime and a subject of legal censorship in the region—investigates how televised media may contribute to changing discursive norms. By strategically shifting footing and generating a vivid televisual conflict, the hosts open up a discursive space that allows for the transgression of discursive prohibitions without jeopardizing the legal status of the show.

This chapter explores the theme of silence about sexuality within religious communities. The discussion focuses not only on sexuality as religious taboo that necessitates silence but also on innovative ways to talk about sex while containing the taboo through uses of humor, indirect speech, vagueness, and euphemism. The authors argue that research can benefit from a closer examination of how discourse about sexuality within a religious context is often double-voiced, especially among those whose sexual practices and identifications are censored by religious dogma. The chapter explores this tension in the existing literature and then uses linguistic data to illustrate how people can use speech and silence to circumvent and transgress religious and linguistic taboos.

The article examines the pragmatic meaning of direct quotation boundaries in Swahili. The application of conversation and discourse analysis to naturally occurring talk in media settings reveals that by avoiding reporting verbs, speakers manage to create an imagined participant framework involving co-present participants in a hypothetical dialog between ‘me’ and ‘you,’ which becomes an appropriate context for imperative verbs. In Searlean terms, these imperative verbs have a twofold function, namely the function of bald directives and of indirect representative speech acts. Speakers employ multimodal resources to signal to co-participants the pragmatic value of these speech acts. The coordinated use of verbally unframed quotations with imperative verbs proves to be a strategy with which Swahili speakers display their epistemic authority. By so doing, Swahili speakers are able to represent a personal stance as a societal moral norm and to contribute to the construction of social normativity through media discourse.