‘Awww, she is feeding you’

Undertaking a video call with very young children can pose significant challenges, as children may wander away or fail to pay attention to the people on the screen. Previous studies have provided important insights into how adults try various strategies to engage young children in such video calls. Less attention has been paid, however, to the children’s perspective: how children orient themselves toward video-mediated communication technologies and the nature of these mediated interactions. Based on 56 recorded hours of naturally occurring video calls between migrant parents and the very young children (aged 8–36 months) they leave behind in China, this article examines how these children spontaneously display engagement and disengagement during a video call. This study highlights children’s interactional competence in engaging with the mediated format of interactions. Very young children can deploy various communicative resources that orient towards the affordance of video-mediated communication technology, such as manoeuvring the camera direction and initiating feeding and showing sequences. The analyses also illustrate that young children actively achieve disengagement in video calls through the artful use of language, body and the material world. These findings contribute to understanding children’s situated practices with digital technology in family communication, and how children are active interlocutors who guide the adults’ actions in moment-by-moment unfolding interactions.

‘Two’s company, three’s a crowd’

This paper examines how young children mobilize interactional resources to position peers as neither fully included nor fully excluded in a preschool classroom. A single case of a video recording of three preschool-aged girls was analysed using conversation analysis. Two girls restricted access to a third girl and positioned her on the periphery in peer activity. The third girl’s entry into the activity was restricted through the other two’s claims of object ownership, limited physical access to objects, multi-modal practices that diverted attention away from the coveted objects, and assessments and sanctions around engagement with an object. The recurrent attempts to keep out the third girl were undertaken through partitioning. Findings highlight how children protect dyadic relationships.

Action bids in children with speech impairments

The paper illustrates a practice, which we have called ‘marking’, observed in play interactions between parents and children with Down syndrome (DS) aged 3–8 years. Markings are minimal turns that rely on prosody, embodied resources and indexicality to foreground events within an ongoing activity and convey a stance toward them. Markings can be both retrospective and prospective (i.e. referring to a just-occurred or an incipient event). As first pair parts, they are open action bids that prompt recipients to display their co-orientation towards the referent. Responses from parents (i.e. second markings) can take the form of repeats or expansions; after prospective marking the recipient can also add support to the incipient activity the child has marked. We discuss marking as the core constituent of a larger family of actions for ‘sharing noteworthiness’, but also as a designedly undetermined action bid with specific conversational uses for children and adults alike.

Children’s demands for parental action

Theory and research on parent–child interaction generally make a priori assumptions of asymmetry in authority between parent and child. Rather than investigating how children exercise autonomy by resisting parental authority, I examine their methods for exercising deontic authority in interaction with their parents. Using conversation analysis and drawing on Stevanovic and Peräkylä’s distinction between deontic status and stance, I analyse video-recorded naturally occurring interactions in which children issue demands to their parents, thus claiming a high deontic stance. Parents may choose to comply and reinforce the claim or not. Domains of deontic authority are (re)negotiated when children pursue compliance; though children can test the boundaries of their authority, parental responses reinforce them, reifying their own authority.

‘What? Olaf is the taxi driver?’

While children’s remarkable ability to co-construct spontaneous fantasy narratives in pretend play interaction has been noted, sequential organization embedded in the collaborative construction of narratives have received little research attention. Drawing on an ethnomethodological and conversation analysis perspective, the current study examines the sequential organization of pretend play narratives co-constructed in children’s play interaction. Close sequential analysis based on 30 hours of audio and video recordings reveals an array of resources and interactional practices used to construct and maintain the spontaneous narratives. Sequential analysis allows to observe sense-making procedures embedded in the way participating children respond to and develop the storyline. The paper concludes with a reflection on how real-world knowledge informs and regulates the co-constructional process of fantasy narratives.

Children’s cooperation in a number activity in kindergarten

Norwegian kindergartens organize school-preparation activities for five- and six-year-old children. Prior studies have mainly focused on the distribution and content of preparatory activities, whereas there is less research about children’s perspectives and contributions. Video data was collected in a Norwegian kindergarten over a seven-month period, and the paper analyses how children cooperate and use verbal, non-verbal and material resources in an outdoor activity focused on numbers and counting. The children share knowledge about numbers and the rules of the activity, and they show strong willingness to include each other in the activity. The main implication for practice is that children at this age are in possession of quite advanced cooperative skills and capable of managing a number activity.

How primary school children address reading problems in dialogic reading

In dialogic reading during inquiry learning settings in primary school, pupils read, think and talk together about text fragments for answering their research questions. In this process, pupils may encounter reading problems, regarding word identification or meaning. Conversation analysis is used to demonstrate how these reading problems are collaboratively addressed. Word identification problems are mostly signalled implicitly during the genuine reading activity and are in most cases immediately corrected by the co-participant, to continue the reading activity as smooth as possible. Meaning problems are displayed more explicitly, by use of requests for information, that are explicit about the purpose, but not always explicitly addressed to the other participant. Therefore all participants, including the text in a principal role, can assist.

Asking for more

This paper addresses the ways in which teachers in whole-class discussions invite students to elaborate their previous turn. Our conversation analytic study uncovers that the teachers’ invitations are prompted by elicited as well as spontaneous student turns of both subjective and factual nature. While giving the students the space to expand on their previous turn, most invitations nevertheless steer towards a specific type of response, namely an account or explanation. Only incidentally, the invitations simply solicit a continuation. The fact that the invitations follow not only teacher-initiated, but also student-initiated contributions reflects the teachers’ attempts to foster an actual discussion framework in which they partly hand over control and in which the student contributions are taken up for further consideration.

‘I was just thinking’

Based on a corpus of child mental health assessment meetings, this article explores how practitioners use reports on their own cognitive processing, such as I was just thinking or I’m just wondering, in interaction with children and adolescents presenting with potential mental health issues. Using the methods of conversation analysis, the findings reveal different ways in which this device is used to encourage the child to engage with a particular topic, interpretation, or version of events from the standpoint of subjective experience; in other words, to produce feelings-talk. The analysis contributes further towards the understanding of child–adult interaction in professional arenas of action: in this case child mental health assessments.