Deploying an everyday life approach, this article focuses on the kindergarten meal, defined as a space in which humans, materials and discursive elements interact. The article identifies and discusses two co-existing perspectives on the everyday meals that emphasise children as future beings and here-and-now beings. Through the concepts of smoothing and striation the paper discusses how these perspectives produce different mechanisms of regulation and agency, and position the eaters differently. The paper emphasises kindergarten mealtime as an ambiguous space that does not offer simple discussions about good and bad meal situations. The paper thereby adds to the existing literature within children’s geographies which emphasise interactional, relational and material aspects of children’s lives. It does so by revisiting some concepts, striation and smoothing, that has been used to explore children’s spaces and child–adult relations, but argue that these concepts describe ambivalent and complex processes in children’s and adult’s everyday lives.

Young children’s eating practices and mealtimes within early childhood education and care have attracted considerable attention over the past 30 years, with an increasing focus on nutrition and family-style meals. Research in this field is typically conducted in parallel strands that would benefit from an overview perspective and critical discussion. This article addresses that need, reviewing international research from 166 empirical papers published between January 1990 to December 2020. A scoping literature review was used to inductively identify three core areas of research: i) factors influencing children’s eating practices, ii) teacher’s and children’s perspectives on mealtimes, and iii) situated meal practices. Key trends included a focus on repeated exposure, modeling behavior, teachers’ feeding practices, rules and norms vs. playfulness, and participation in the meal as event. Future research could work across disciplinary boundaries and combine a focus on nutritional concerns with an examination of the multimodal interaction within the mealtimes.

This article is a single case analysis of trouble talk taking place between teachers and care workers at a Swedish special residential home for boys and young men (aged 12-20). The topic of the talk is a potentially unwarranted solitary detention of a student. Using sequential- and Membership Categorisation analyses, we examine the participants methods for talking about the event as institutionally problematic while avoiding to blame the teacher responsible for the disciplinary action. Specifically, we demonstrate how the grounds for the confinement were initially disputed by the care workers and how an extended negotiation with the teachers eventually lead to a jointly acceptable account of the event. This involved recasting the event as a real-life experience that should afford the student important opportunities for socialisation into the social and institutional orders which inform daily life at the residential home. More generally, the analysis demonstrates how presumed knowledge of social and institutional structures and practices is mobilised and negotiated - through categorial ordering work (Hester & Eglin, 1997) - in the service of coming to terms with the complex accountability arrangements of the special residential home.

This article is a single case analysis of trouble talk taking place between teachers and care workers at a Swedish special residential home for boys and young men (aged 12–20). The topic of the talk is a potentially unwarranted solitary detention of a student. Using sequential- and Membership Categorisation analyses, we examine the participants’ methods for talking about the event as institutionally problematic while avoiding to blame the teacher responsible for the disciplinary action. Specifically, we demonstrate how the grounds for the confinement were initially disputed by the care workers and how an extended negotiation with the teachers eventually lead to a jointly acceptable account of the event. This involved recasting the event as a real-life experience that should afford the student important opportunities for socialisation into the social and institutional orders which inform daily life at the residential home. More generally, the analysis demonstrates how presumed knowledge of social and institutional structures and practices is mobilised and negotiated – through ‘categorial ordering work’ (Hester & Eglin, 1997) – in the service of coming to terms with the complex accountability arrangements of the special residential home.

Education programmes are often built on assumptions of monolingualism, despite the fact of – and the cognitive and social benefits of – childhood multilingualism. Jacob Cromdal and Kirsten Stoewer encourage us to recalibrate our understanding of childhood multilingualism, by moving away from a monolingual bias in our understanding of language development, to accommodate the interactional competence displayed and deployed by children when drawing on more than one language. The chapter demonstrates how language alternation (shifting between languages) for specific purposes is a common social practice and can be harnessed for learning interactions with children.

I förskolans verksamhet förenas pedagogik med omsorg, vilket framträder i de mest vardagliga aktiviteter såsom morgonsamling, måltider och påklädning. I dessa aktiviteter samspelar pedagoger och barn - ofta små barn vars språkliga och kommunikativa färdigheter är under utveckling. Mycket av forskningen om små barn handlar just om deras utveckling, närmare bestämt fokuserar på vad barn inte kan. Genom att studera förskolans rutinaktiviteter med hjälp av multimodal interaktionsanalys, kan vi i stället lära oss om vad barn faktiskt gör med de färdigheter de besitter när de samspelar med pedagoger såväl som med andra barn.

Although psychological states have been widely examined as social objects indiscursive psychology (DP), little is known about the interactional organisationof perception. This chapter is about joint sensorial activities in driver training.Specifically, we explore how neophyte drivers are being trained in identifyingand analysing kinetic information—including the car’s vibration, movementand direction—when performing routine car control operations. Throughmultimodal conversation analysis of four video-recorded examples, wedemonstrate how driving instructors gesturally enact sensations to invite theirstudents to “feel” the car’s kinetic status, how they jointly produce coordinatedsensory activities and how the sensoriality of the event is intersubjectivelyestablished through “feel enquiries”. Treating sensory perception asembedded—and embodied—in practical social activity, highlights the benefitsof including corporeality in future DP enquiry.

In this chapter, we offer a commentary of the individual chapters as well as the contribution of the volume as a whole. Specifically, we discuss the notion of children’s social competence advanced in this book, as well as its intellectual history in ethnomethodology, against the reductionist conceptualisations of children and young persons often found in mainstream social and behavioural science literature. Moreover, we also discuss the relatively broad approach taken towards children’s mental health and well-being, and conclude by identifying some implications that the chapters bring to this research field as well as to professional practitioners working with troubled children.

This article examines ascriptions of mental states to other road users in live traffic driver training. Through this practice, instructors formulate how others make sense of the trainee drivers car. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we demonstrate how others side formulations support trainee drivers communicative handling of the car during ongoing coordination events. In contrast, formulations occurring after coordination events serve educational ends, yielding the generic inferential practices by which competent drivers make contextual sense of others actions. Therefore, others side formulations comprise an important instructional resource for introducing neophyte drivers into the real-world theorizing, rendering traffic its orderly social character. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Shifting focus from monolingual to multilingual talk within conversationanalysis has offered new, radically social and post-cognitivist understandingsof bilingualism, especially through the empirical study of language alternation.This chapter presents some central ideas in the literature on language alternationand traces the emergence and development of the organisational approach. Thisprioritises a participant perspective, whereby bilinguals mobilise their linguisticresources to organise their actions in mundane and institutional settings.While languaging rather than the linguistic concept of “language” is advocatedto capture the nature of bilingual talk, extending the analysis to include multimodalaspects of social interaction is put forward as a promising directionfor future inquiry.

This article explores the practices of membership categorization in the interactions of clients and counselors on a national Australian helpline (Kids Helpline [KHL]) for children and young persons. Our focus is on membership categories drawn from three membership category devices (MCDs): stage-of-life (SOL), age, and family. Analysis draws on data across different contact modalities—email and web-counseling sessions—to examine how category-generated features are relevantly occasioned, attended to, and managed by the parties in the course of interaction. This shows clients' use of MCDs in presenting their trouble and building a relevant case for their grievance. By examining counselors' subsequent receipts of the clients' complaints, we are able to trace some of the cultural knowledge that the clients' categorizations make relevant to the counselors. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates how the inherent flexibility of MCDs allows counselors to exploit these same categorial resources and to re-specify the clients' trouble in a more positive fashion to accomplish counseling work. In explicating how taken-for-granted notions of the lifespan as well as of family relations are mobilized by participants in KHL's sessions, the findings contribute to previous studies of social interaction in counseling, and to research on social identity and categorization more broadly.

This paper studies parsing as a practice used in mobile instruction. The findings build on ethnomethodological conversation analysis and on observations made on video data that have been collected from three settings: skiing, driving a car and flying a plane. In the data, novice learners are instructed by more experienced instructors to accomplish variousmobile tasks. The paper shows how instructors use parsing to guide learners to carry out, step-by-step, the sub-actions that the ongoing mobile task (e.g. turning, landing) is composed of. The paper argues that parsing is a practice employed by instructors to highlight the sub-actions of a mobile task. Instructors may also use parsing to orientlearners to emergent problems to do with the timing, quality and order of the sub-actions in the performance of a complex mobile task. Finally, the paper shows that sometimes there is not enough time to parse an ongoing task, in which case the parsing can be carried out afterwards.

This article takes an interest in how students at a driving school areinstructed how to make the car's behaviour intelligible (accountable)to other road users in traffic. Taking the indicator as an example,the analytic focus is on the ways in which the indicator'srelevance is instructed and its timely activation practiced, andhow activating the indicator is instructed as part of moreencompassing turning procedures. The indicator is one of the centralresources built into cars for displaying to others a driver'sintention about where to go next. Although indicating does not,in itself, affect the movement of the car, activating the indicatoris crucial for allowing others to anticipate a car's movement inspace, and coordinate themselves with it. The analysis showshow instructors manage trainee drivers' instructed actions duringdriving by providing descriptions of what using the indicatoraccomplishes before a directive to turn (a), after a directive to turn(b), and as accounts for initiating correction of trainee driver carcontrol activity (c).

In this chapter we discuss the use of poetry in a bilingual language classroom. The analysis draws on video recordings of an English lesson in third grade taking place in an English-medium school in Bangladesh. During the session, dedicated to the poem “Waters” by E.H. Newlin, the teacher performs a structured reciting of a poem, while at the same time engaging the students in joint explorative discussions of the meaning of individual words, as well as the holistic sense of the poem. Through sequential and multimodal analysis of the interaction, we explore the methods by which the two instructional orientations are pursued throughout the session, highlighting in particular the role of multimodal action design and language alternation. The chapter offers a participant-oriented account of literary aesthetics in bilingual instruction.

This article deals with the organisation of correction in mobile instructional settings. Five sets of videodata (>250 h) documenting how learners were instructed to fly aeroplanes, drive cars and ride bicycles inreal life traffic were examined to reveal some common features of correction exchanges. Through detailed multimodal analysis of participants’ actions, it is shown how instructors systematically elaborate their corrective instructions to include relevant information about the trouble and remedial action – a practice we refer to as the unpacking of correction. It is proposed that the practice of unpacking the local particulars of corrections (i) provides for the instructional character of the interaction, and (ii) is highly sensitive to the relevant physical and mobile contingencies. These findings contribute to the existing literature on the interactional organisation of correction and mobility, as well as to ongoing work in ethnomethodologyand conversation analysis on teaching and learning as members’ phenomena.

This study examines classroom task instructions—phases traditionally associatedwith noninteractional objectives and operations—and reveals their compositionas interactionally complex and cocrafted. Analyses of video sequences of taskinstructional activity from three different secondary school lessons show thatstudent questions routinely contribute to making task instructions followable. In thisenvironment, student questions set up tensions between the demand to respond tothe individual and responsibility to uphold the general instructional agenda. Datashow that, as addressees of student questions, instructors take great care to meetboth individual and collective accountabilities. To meet obligation to the addresseeand exploit the instructional benefit of the question for the cohort, dualaddressivity—targeting two or more addressees in response to a student question—proves a crucial method for achieving such principled practice. Educationally, itappears vital to recognize student instructed action as integral to task-relatedlearning.

Pranking can be understood as challenging a normative social order. One environment where pranking occurs is in institutional interaction. The present study examines a sample of pranking calls to telephone helplines for children and young people. Some cases had been posted on YouTube by the person doing the pranking; others were from a subcollection of possible pranks, extracted from a larger corpus of Australian children’s counselling helpline calls. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis we aim to understand the inferential and sequential resources involved in pranking within telephone-mediated counselling services for children and youth. Our analysis shows pranksters know the norms of counselling helplines by their practices employed for subverting them. YouTube pranksters exploit next turns of talk to retrospectively cast what the counsellor has just said as a possible challenge to the perception of the call as anormal counselling one. One practice evident in both sources was the setting up of provocative traps to break a linguistic taboo. This detailed study of pranking in interaction provides documentary evidence of its idiosyncratic yet patterned local accomplishment in telephone-mediated counselling services aimed at children and youth.

This Handbook illustrates the importance of examining child mental health from a different perspective, one that assumes that psychiatric categories are made real in and through both written and spoken language. It gathers a range of applied and theoretical analyses from leading scholars and clinicians in order to examine the conversational practices of children diagnosed with mental health disorders alongside those of their parents, families and practitioners. The contributors move away from viewing mental illness as an objective truth; instead reintroducing the relevance of language in constructing and deconstructing the assumptions that surround the diagnosis and treatment of childhood mental health disorders. Including chapters on ADHD, autism, depression, eating disorders and trauma, this collection addresses the diversity involved in discussing child mental health.Divided into six parts: the place of conversation/discourse analysis; critical approaches; social constructions of normal/abnormal; situating and exploring the difficulties involved; managing problem behaviour and discussing different practices involved; this Handbook presents a comprehensive overview of child mental health. It is an essential reference resource for all those involved or interested in child mental health.

This article reports on a case study of an emergency call with a 12-year-old girl, who is hearably not a native speaker of Swedish. A sequential analysis of the recorded call revealed two interesting interactional practices through which the participants can be seen to pursue mutual understanding. The first type of practice involves the participants’ orientation toward potential or projected problems of comprehension and should therefore be understood in terms of preemptive management of mutual understanding. This is chiefly accomplished by either party (a) making sure that the other party has understood; (b) checking the correctness and adequacy of one’s own understanding; and finally (c) displaying one’s own understanding of the other party en passant, that is, without requiring the other party’s confirmation. The second type of practice, commonly known as conversational repair, is used to deal with established problems of comprehension. The methods through which these problems are managed involve (d) repeating and paraphrasing preceding turns or their problematic fragments; (e) finding alternative ways of talking about demonstrably noncomprehended information; and finally (f) postponing such problematic exchanges. The study demonstrates that despite the institutionally asymmetric character of emergency calls, both participants are actively engaged in working toward intersubjectivity, and the analysis identifies several different ways through which the parties orient to and handle interactional trouble so as to secure mutual comprehension in a socially smooth yet efficient manner.

Calls for emergency assistance are operated by a range of organizations across the world, including local police authorities, medical institutions, and dedicated dispatch centers.

This article examines two corpora of telephone calls to the Swedish emergency services SOSAlarm. The focus of analysis is on the procedural consequentiality of the routine opening by theoperator. In the first corpus, the summons are answered by identification of the service via the emergency number. In the second corpus, the protocol has been altered, such that the opening entails the emergency number combined with a standard query concerning the nature of the incident. Through sequential and categorial analysis of the two collections, we highlight the distinct trajectories of action ensuing from the two opening protocols. The stand-alone emergency number opening typically results in callers asking for a specific service. In contrast, opening turns that endwith a direct query about the incident tend to solicit brief descriptions of the trouble. We discuss the benefits of the latter procedure in terms of topical progression and institutional relevance, proposing that the work of emergency assistance agencies worldwide might consider implementing opening routines with a similar design.

This is a conversation analytic study examining how two ways of answering emergency calls have different implications and consequences for the ensuing interaction. In an older corpus of 22 calls to a Swedish emergency center, the calls were routinely answered with an identification phrase “ninety thousand” (i.e. the telephone number 90 000) or “SOS ninety thousand”, whereas the 52 calls in a recently collected corpus are routinely answered with an identification phrase followed by a question, taking the format “SOS 1-1-2, what has occurred?” The analysis shows how the different answering formats affect what is being brought up at different sequential positions during call beginnings, and also how the standardized relational pair of “help provider” and “help seeker”, each with its respective rights and obligations, is constructed. The article concludes with a discussion of the benefits of the latter way of answering emergency calls, arguing that it helps making the distribution of responsibilities among the interactants clear, and that it allows for a truncation of an unnecessary sequence. In this way, the latter format enhances topical progression and promotes institutional relevance.

Delaktighet och kommunikation är centrala ideal inom vård, omsorg och socialt arbete. Men vad innebär delaktighet i praktiken och hur kan teorier om delaktighet och professionella samtal förstås i olika praktiska sammanhang? Med utgångspunkt i svensk och internationell forskning ger den här boken en djupare inblick i villkor och möjligheter för professionella samtal. I ett tvärvetenskapligt perspektiv på kommunikation presenteras exempel från nya studier på vad delaktighet innebär inom en rad miljöer: nödsamtal, akut- och specialistsjukvård, äldreomsorg, biståndsbedömning, arbetsrelaterad rehabilitering och vårdutbildning.

Boken passar väl för utbildningar till sjuksköterska, socionom, arbetsterapeut, sjukgymnast och läkare. I boken beskrivs även olika metoder för datainsamling och analys av data. Det innebär att boken med fördel kan knytas till metodundervisning och examensarbete på avancerad nivå.

This article examines the initial exchanges in calls to the Swedish emergency services, focusing on callers’ responses to the standardised opening phrase “SOS one one two, what has occurred?”. Comparisons across three age groups – children, teenagers and adults – revealed significant differences in caller behaviour. Whereas teenagers and adults offered reports of the incident, child callers were more prone to request dispatch of specific assistance units. This pattern was only observable when children were accompanied by an adult relative, which leads us to propose that child callers may be operating under prior adult instruction concerning how to request help. The second part of the analysis examines the local organisation of participants' actions, showing how turn-design and sequencing manifest the local concerns of the two parties. The analysis thus combines quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the ways through which the parties jointly produce an early sense of emergency incidents. These results are discussed in terms of children's agency and competence as informants granted to them by emergency operators, and how such competence ascriptions run against commonsense conceptualisations of children as less-than-full-fledged members of society.

Volume 15 of Sociological Studies of Children and Youth investigates the interactional procedures used by children and young people as disputes arise in varying contexts of their everyday life. Disputes are a topic of angst and anxiety for children, young people and adults alike, and yet are important times for interactional matters to be addressed. A particular intention of the book is its ethnomethodological focus, bringing a fine-grained analysis and understanding to disputes and related interactional matters. Such analysis highlights the in situ competency of children and young people as they manage their social relationships and disputes to offer insight into how children arrange their social lives within the context of school, home, neighbourhood, correctional, club and after school settings. This volume offers a contemporary understanding of the relational matters of childrens peer cultures to better understand and address the complex nature of children and young peoples everyday lives in todays society. 

Conversation analysts have begun to challenge long-cherished assumptions about the relationship between gender and language, asking new questions about the interactional study of gender and providing fresh insights into the ways it may be studied empirically. Drawing on a lively set of audio- and video-recorded materials of real-life interactions, including domestic telephone calls, children's play, mediation sessions, police-suspect interviews, psychiatric assessments and calls to telephone helplines, this volume is the first to showcase the latest thinking and cutting-edge research of an international group of scholars working on topics at the intersection of gender and conversation analysis. Theoretically, it pushes forward the boundaries of our understanding of the relationship between conversation and gender, charting new and exciting territory. Methodologically, it offers readers a clear, practical understanding of how to analyse gender using conversation analysis, by presenting detailed demonstrations of this method in use.

Här ger arton forskare som alla varit doktorander till professor Karin Aronsson sin beskrivning av olika former av vardagliga fenomen. Det handlar om hur människor i olika sammanhang samspelar och skapar mening. Gemensamt för de författare som bidrar i boken är att de är eller har varit doktorander vid Institutionen Barn och tema Kommunikation, vid Linköpings universitet. Sedan mitten av 1980-talet har institutionen erbjudit en dynamisk forskningsmiljö för personer med intresse för samtal, kulturella uttryck och socialt liv i och utanför institutionella sammanhang.

Här ger arton forskare som alla varit doktorander till professor Karin Aronsson sin beskrivning av olika former av vardagliga fenomen. Det handlar om hur människor i olika sammanhang samspelar och skapar mening. Gemensamt för de författare som bidrar i boken är att de är eller har varit doktorander vid Institutionen Barn och tema Kommunikation, vid Linköpings universitet. Sedan mitten av 1980-talet har institutionen erbjudit en dynamisk forskningsmiljö för personer med intresse för samtal, kulturella uttryck och socialt liv i och utanför institutionella sammanhang.

Här ger arton forskare som alla varit doktorander till professor Karin Aronsson sin beskrivning av olika former av vardagliga fenomen. Det handlar om hur människor i olika sammanhang samspelar och skapar mening. Gemensamt för de författare som bidrar i boken är att de är eller har varit doktorander vid Institutionen Barn och tema Kommunikation, vid Linköpings universitet. Sedan mitten av 1980-talet har institutionen erbjudit en dynamisk forskningsmiljö för personer med intresse för samtal, kulturella uttryck och socialt liv i och utanför institutionella sammanhang.

In this article, we examine how bilingual preschoolers enact, in the course of ‘free play’, previous experiences from secondlanguage instructional activities. In so doing, the participants transform a set of educational routines for their own purposes withinthe current activity. Hence, apart from merely drawing on multilingual interactional resources, participation in such activities allowschildren to exploit some normative features of educational practice. The interactional organization of these events is explicatedsequentially, examining in some analytic detail the children’s methods for invoking, repairing and acting upon educational routinesand practices within non-instructional activities. The analyses are discussed in terms of children’s understanding and production ofinstitutional order(s) in and through mundane interaction.# 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This article examines how troublesome events are described in children’s emergency calls. In focus forthe analysis are the procedures through which participants methodically deal with contextual informationconcerning the reported emergency event during the early phases of the call, i.e., up to the point where theoperator is able to set emergency priority. This choice is motivated by a set of institutional concerns thatsurface in the interaction typically, but not solely, through the operator’s ways of receiving and managing thecaller’s unfolding report. The initial phase of emergency calls thus offers a locus of order, a phenomenon initself, in addition to offering access to some of the finer details of sequential and categorical organisation ofinteraction in emergency calls. Applying Ryle’s (1968) distinction between ‘thin’ vs. ‘thick’ description(roughly, the description of an observed event vs. description of the meaning of an observed event) to thereporting of emergencies, we argue that determining the relevant level of ‘thickness’ is, above all, a task forthe participants themselves. Hence, our analysis shows that interaction during the early phases of emergencycalls is distinctively geared towards producing a ‘thick-enough’ description of the reported event. Thesefindings are discussed in terms of the methodological problem of how features of the context can enterinteraction analytic accounts of institutional exchanges. Specifically, we argue that relevant features ofcontext ‘brought along’ to emergency calls (to do, for instance, with operators’ institutional agendas orcallers’ situations) are also ‘brought about’ by the participants as part of the interactional work throughwhich one party’s observations are jointly transformed into descriptions that form accountable reports ofemergency events.