Peer-reviewed article

From linguistic repair to whole-child participation: negotiation of meaning and habits of mind in young children’s task-based storytelling

Jiamin Xu · 21 Sept 2026

Abstract

This study examines how young children’s negotiation of meaning (NoM) in task-based storytelling can be understood beyond linguistic repair through the Habits of Mind (HoM) framework. Using HoM as an interpretive lens, it examines how children’s clarification requests, confirmation checks, repetitions, and corrections made visible the linguistic, cognitive, social-emotional, and imaginative dimensions of participation. Data are drawn from a classroom-based action research project in a second-grade classroom in South Florida. Ten children aged seven to eight and four mothers participated in eleven sessions involving collaborative storytelling and digital storytelling. From 334 NoM episodes identified across approximately 16.5 h of recordings, 92 episodes in which NoM co-occurred with HoM-related participation were selected for fine-grained, turn-by-turn discourse analysis. The findings show that NoM strategies functioned as interactional resources through which children made uncertainty discussable, sustained peer alignment, refined language and narrative coherence, monitored their own contributions, and coordinated collective task progression. The study suggests that NoM in young learners’ storytelling can be read through a HoM lens as whole-child participation beyond language repair.