'I wonder what you know...': Teachers designing requests for factual information

The early years are significant in optimising children’s educational, emotional and social outcomes and have become a major international policy priority. Within Australia, policy levers have prioritised early childhood education, with a focus on program quality, as it is associated with lifelong success. Longitudinal studies have found that high quality teacher-child interactions are an essential element of high quality programs, and teacher questioning is one aspect of teacher-child interactions that has been attributed to affecting the quality of education, linking open ended questioning to higher cognitive achievement. Teachers, however, overwhelmingly ask more closed than open questions. In the classroom, like everyday interaction, questions in interaction require answers. They are used to request, offer, repair, challenge, seek agreement (Curl & Drew, 2008; Enfield, Stivers, & Levinson, 2010; Hayano, 2013; Schegloff, 2007). Teachers use questions to set agendas and manage lessons (McHoul, 1978; Mehan, 1979; Sacks, 1995), and to gauge students’ knowledge and understanding (Lerner, 1995; McHoul, 1978; Mehan, 1979). Drawing on data from the Australian Research Council project Interacting with Knowledge: Interacting with people: Web searching in early childhood, this paper focuses on an extended sequence of talk between a teacher with two students aged between 3.5 and 5 years in a preschool classroom. The episode, drawn from a corpus of over 200 hours of video recorded data, captures how the teacher and children undertake an online search for images of lady beetles and hairy caterpillars on the Web. Ethnomethodological and conversation analysis approaches examine how the teacher asks questions, which call on the children to display their factual knowledge about the search topic. The fine grained analysis shows how teachers design their interactions to prompt children’s displays of factual knowledge, and how the design of factual questions affect a student’s response in terms of what and how they respond. In focussing on how the teacher designs factual questions and how children respond to these questions it shows that question design can close down a student’s reply; or elicit a range of answers, from one word to extended more detailed responses. Understanding how the design of teachers’ questions can influence students’ responses has pedagogic implications and may support educators to make intentional decisions regarding their own questioning techniques

Digital Technologies

This chapter starts with an overview of the research on young children’s storytelling both in the home and in preschool settings. It will then turn the reader’s attention to research concerned with the interactions of children aged from 1 year 11 months to 3 years in the home, collected in Australia. It aims to illustrate how storytelling in story book reading and in recounts is achieved and changes over time. The chapter ends with a discussion about practical implications for teachers

'Two's company, three's a crowd': Multi-modal engagement with objects to position a child on the periphery of peer membership in a preschool classroom

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

Methodological observations on the secret life of children's play: The push-and-pull of peer membership.

This research aims to show through video recordings and conversation analysis how children use language and multimodal interactions to accomplish peer social orders. Young children often find physical and interactional spaces to undertake their peer activities without the presence of adults. At times, children's social interactions may be hidden from adults, and may include excluding others from their peer group play (Corsaro, 1985, Paley, 1992; Sheldon, 1996). Underpinned by the sociologies of childhood, children were viewed as competent to manage their social interactions in situ (Corsaro, 2005; Cromdal, 2006; Danby & Baker, 1998). The methodological approaches of ethnomethodology and conversational analysis were employed to investigate children's social worlds. Ethnomethodological studies concentrate on locating the interactional methods interactants use to create shared meaning and conversation analysis focuses on the sequential features of talk-in-interaction to describe how talk is organised and produced as the interaction unfolds. The ethical considerations were addressed through child centric approaches relating to child assent. Conversation analysis afforded understandings of how two girls in preschool produced rules and conditions that restricted a third girl's access to the play resources and to the peer group, so that her membership always was uncertain. This sequence of push-and-pull activity outside the teacher's gaze, shows how children's secret everyday life is produced within the boundaries of the classroom, even within the presence of a nearby adult. Findings provide an opportunity for researchers and educators to understand and recognise the secret lives of children's social order in classroom contexts

All in the family : Siblings' multimodal interactions with digital media

Siblings growing up in everyday family life typical- ly have many opportunities to participate in shared aspects of family social and cultural life, and yet we still know very little about siblings’ multimodal inter- actions when using digital media. Using video-record- ed data of everyday family interactions, this presen- tation investigates how siblings interact with each when engaged in digital gaming. Gaining access to family everyday life is a sensitive and delicate matter, particularly when the data collection approach goes beyond interviews and surveys to observe and video record actual practices as they unfold. Analysis drew on ethnomethodological and conversation analysis approaches to show in fine-grained detail the multi- modal actions that the siblings used to support each other’s game play. Ranging in age from 2 to 9 years of age, siblings at times were participants in a mutually shared digital activity; at other times, while engaged in their own digital activities, they intervened to of- fer support to their sibling. For instance, there were instances of siblings calling out for help, and receiv- ing solicited (or unsolicited) guidance through verbal and non-verbal means. As well, strategies of problem solving and collaboration were evident across these social interactions. The strategies used by the siblings are not unique to a family interactional context, as col- laboration and problem solving occur in other con- texts as well, including in classroom settings. Rather, we show that the support undertaken by children is not an age-related feature; routinely we saw younger siblings supporting older siblings. The informal inter- actions that occurred without adult presence offers rare insights into contemporary sibling life in the home. It may be that digital gaming is providing new opportunities for siblings to connect with each oth- er. Understanding siblings’ multimodal interactions in their digital worlds may help better understand the positive influences of siblings in learning new con- cepts and skills, and how they socially produce their relationship