Peer-reviewed article
Child-initiated informings and conversational participation in a bilingual preschool
Olga Anatoli, Asta Čekaitė ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study examines how very young children in a Swedish-English preschool initiate conversations with teachers by sharing new information. Using video recordings and conversation analysis, researchers found that children actively practice bilingual skills, manage turn-taking, and present their ideas as relevant within their educational context. Through these child-initiated interactions, children develop conversational competence and establish themselves as knowledgeable speakers in a multilingual setting.
Key points
- Children initiate informings by drawing on bilingual skills in turn-taking and recipient design
- Child-initiated participation helps children navigate institutional constraints and secure teacher attention
- Children present topics as relevant and coherent within local material and conversational contexts
- Multiparty institutional settings provide a cooperative, transformative social process for developing interactional competence
- Child-initiated conversation participation is an essential affordance for bilingual language development
Limitations
This study is based on ethnographic fieldwork in one Swedish-English preschool and uses conversation analysis of video recordings; it cannot determine whether findings generalize to other bilingual educational contexts or provide quantitative measures of language development outcomes.
Abstract
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.