When education seeps into 'free play' : How preschool children accomplish multilingual education

When education seeps into ‘free play’:

How preschool children accomplish multilingual education

Polly Bjork-Willen *, Jakob Cromdal

Department of Child Studies, Linkoping University, S-58183 Linkoping, Sweden

Received 30 August 2006; received in revised form 30 May 2007; accepted 10 June 2007

Abstract

In this article, we examine how bilingual preschoolers enact, in the course of ‘free play’, previous experiences from second

language instructional activities. In so doing, the participants transform a set of educational routines for their own purposes within

the current activity. Hence, apart from merely drawing on multilingual interactional resources, participation in such activities allows

children to exploit some normative features of educational practice. The interactional organization of these events is explicated

sequentially, examining in some analytic detail the children’s methods for invoking, repairing and acting upon educational routines

and practices within non-instructional activities. The analyses are discussed in terms of children’s understanding and production of

institutional order(s) in and through mundane interaction.

# 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Children’s play; Conversation analysis; Ethnomethodology; Instructional settings; Learning; Participation; Social interaction

1. Introduction

One of the peculiar – yet often overseen – things about educational organisations for children is that they bring

together distinct social and institutional orders. These orders pose a variety of practical concerns for the participants

who act within the realm of educational settings. In this study, we explore in some degree of interactional detail, how

children orient to and act upon their own understandings of local educational orders. More specifically, we examine

how children enrolled in two distinct multilingual preschools spontaneously initiate and accomplish educational

activities within the realm of ‘free play’ events. We do this by highlighting a range of generic interactional resources,

as well as specifically educational routines, through which the participants enact previously experienced

instructional exercises. Through this procedure, we hope to shed new light on the relation between the educational

order of the preschool and the social order of the peer group, showing in particular how the former is transformed and

integrated within the latter in children’s mundane interaction.

2. Participation in instructional classroom activities

It is something of a truism today to suggest that students’ participation in educational activities has a bearing on

their learning of subject matter. With the earliest explorations of the interactional structure of teaching events in the

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Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 1493–1518

* Corresponding author.

E-mail address: [email protected] (P. Bjork-Willen).

0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2007.06.006

mailto:[email protected]

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2007.06.006

classroom (Bellack et al., 1966; McHoul, 1978; Mehan, 1979; Payne, 1976; Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975; see also

Freebody, 2003, for a rich overview of practice-based educational research) gradually came the realisation that

participation in such events forms both the means for and outcomes of learning. On this view, students do not

merely learn about curricular matter; they also learn about the institutionalised forms of interaction through which

curricular knowledge is negotiated, invoked and displayed in educational practice, as well as how this practice

forms part of broader societal patterns of norms and values (Edwards and Mercer, 1987; Heap, 1980; Macbeth,

2000).

Today, these ideas inform a broad front of interaction-oriented studies of classroom activities, with scholars

continuously exploring the practices of reasoning and construction of intersubjective meaning in its minute,

situated detail within a spectrum of educational events. These include examinations of formalised

speech exchange systems such as teacher-fronted demonstrations and questioning (Paoletti and Fele, 2004;

Macbeth, 2000; Sahlstrom, 1999), storytelling and literacy activities (Baker, 1991; Heap, 1990; Hester and

Francis, 1997) as well as less formalised classroom exchanges such as teacher-led group discussions (Liljestrand,

2002) peer assessment practices within problem based learning curricula (Cromdal et al., 2007), content

discussions within ‘free’ peer group activities (Melander and Sahlstrom, this volume) and small-group booktalk

events (Austin, 1996; Eriksson, 2002), to name but a few examples. These studies share a concern with explicating

how participants to educational events jointly work out – that is, invoke, orient to and produce – a social and moral

order of conduct; in a nutshell, how they engage in talking the local educational order into being (Hester and

Francis, 2000).

3. Participation in multilingual educational activities

While a vast majority of research inquiries into the educational order of classroom life take place in

monolingual settings, studies are increasingly focusing on the routine accomplishment of instructional activities

and other classroom events within the realm of bi- and multilingual education. For instance, in a study of first

graders’ language socialisation at an international school, Willett (1995) shows how students were drawing upon

interactional routines of the official teacher–student exchanges, as well as those provided by educational artefacts,

to display institutional competence in seatwork activities with the peer group. Furthermore, she shows how these

routine institutional forms of talk were elaborated by the students to serve a variety of local purposes within the

group, thus providing for the development of their interactional competence in and for accomplishing accountably

educational business.

In a series of original analyses of talk-in-interaction in a Swedish immersion class, Cekaite and Aronsson

(2004) focus on students’ production of playful contributions to routine instructional exchanges, such as counting

aloud exercises, picture labelling as well as other types of ‘language drills’. Through the recycling of instructional

routines, including utterances accountably produced as ‘teacher talk’, students were able to accomplish subsidiary

humorous sequences, or interactional ‘time outs’, from the standardized instructional exchanges (Cekaite and

Aronsson, 2004). Such moves allowed the students to display, in spite of their limited skills in the language of

instruction, ample procedural knowledge of the normative organisation of institutionalised activities in the

classroom.

Institutional aspects of talk in second language classrooms are further examined by Seedhouse (2004), who

highlights the reflexive relationship between the pedagogical focus of distinct classroom activities and the local

interactional organization through which these activities are accomplished. Through careful analyses of interaction

in second language classrooms, Seedhouse highlights the routine organizational features of instructional activities

that target ‘form-and-accuracy’ and ‘meaning-and-fluency’ aspects of language learning, as well as task-oriented

exchanges between learners and procedural talk that typically precedes any other formal activities in the

classroom. Following Seedhouse’s argument, it is by attending to the minute organizational details of interaction,

that we may gain an insight into how its participants transform ‘‘intended pedagogy into actual pedagogy’’ (p. 95),

thereby reflexively – and routinely – producing a variety of institutional contexts in the second language

classroom.

The prevailing focus on the institutional business of education as conducted in different forms of classroom

interaction has led interaction analysts to explicate the normative order(s) underlying the production of educational

activities. In educational settings where there are more than one language readily available to the participants, such

P. Bjork-Willen, J. Cromdal / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 1493–15181494

normative orders may entail issues of language choice as part of the procedural expectations that the participants are

facing. For instance, in a study of instructional exchanges in a Swedish primary school in Finland, Slotte-Luttge (2005)

shows how bilingual teachers and students collaboratively orient to and produce a monolingual norm of conduct,

according to which all official talk taking place in the classroom should normatively proceed in Swedish. The local

relevance and normativity of the school’s language policy became particularly evident on the relatively few occasions

when, failing to produce the expected action in Swedish, students had to resort to Finnish. Utterances in Finnish were

produced as accountably dispreferred, and were received as such by the teachers as well as by the other students. It is of

little surprise that such a practice will contribute to the students’ conception of academic knowledge and how such

knowledge should be displayed in the classroom. Thus, Slotte-Luttge points out that: ‘‘Knowing means knowing in the

language of the school, and any knowledge that appears in the wrong linguistic guise, counts as non-knowledge’’

(p. 135, our translation).

In addition to studies that explore the institutional organization of instructional exchanges, analyses of

bilingual classroom interaction have also closed in on the talk taking place between students in task-oriented work

groups. For instance, focusing on the interactional production of a joint text in a student group, Tuyay et al. (1995)

show how the participants work at sustaining joint attention on the task and how they organize such practical

activities as structuring and commenting on the evolving text as well as negotiating the details of its form and

content. Although the authors do not explicate analytically the interactional relevance of the two languages being

used in the group, they do point out that the students’ language choice is ‘‘not solely a matter of academic

content’’ (p. 89), but is locally negotiated as part of the group’s task oriented work. Such issues of language choice

and alternation in bilingual work groups have been examined by Cromdal (e.g., 2003a,b, 2005), who shows in a

series of studies how participants locally construct a bilingual order that informs the production and interpretation

of actions in the group. For instance, in a group of Turkish-Danish bilingual eighth grade students engaged in

producing an illustrated cartoon strip, the participants would alternate between the two languages for a range of

local interactional purposes except for narrating the storyline for the cartoon, for which they would use Danish

exclusively (Cromdal, 2000, 2003a). A somewhat different bilingual organization of task oriented work was found

in a study of two bilingual fourth grade students at an English school in Sweden, who were preparing a written

report of their work on the classroom computer (Cromdal, 2003b, 2005). Here, the students would use English

only to produce items for the report they were writing, whereas all other turns at talk, or turn elements, would be

produced in Swedish. Clearly, such bilingual organization of task oriented work entails frequent, and minutely

coordinated, instances of language alternation, showing that the local availability of several languages in the

bilingual classroom can be exploited by its inhabitants to create local interactional orders through which they

pursue different institutional tasks.

To sum up, we have pointed to some recent research that targets the interactional concerns of participants to a

range of educational activities in the bilingual classroom. Studies within this strand of research are about

understanding the ordinary interactional practices in bi- and multilingual education and how, by participating in

these routine practices, teachers and students contribute to the construction of knowledge in the classroom.

Notably, such knowledge entails more than curricular matter. On the students’ part, ‘knowing’ also entails

working out, and acting upon, the normative order(s) of interaction in different educational activities. By

participating in such activities, students take part in being socialized into school culture; a process through which

they develop a grasp of what counts as knowledge in the classroom and how such knowledge is displayed for the

classroom. As we have seen, in bi- and multilingual education, such procedural knowledge may entail concerns

with language choice: what language to use, with whom, and in which activities all comprise an integral part of

‘knowing-in-the-bilingual-classroom’.

4. Aims

In presenting our current concern with the procedural, rather than curricular, aspects of educational interaction,

we have drawn on a selection of studies that focus on multilingual educational settings in school. One might of

course argue that by the time children reach school age, they are already somewhat acquainted with educational

practice. But how do the younger children manage to participate in the very early phases of their educational lives?

What is their understanding of instructional activities as well as the institutional relationships between participants

to such events?

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In the present paper, our concern is with young children’s ways of ‘doing education’ within ‘free play’, that is

within non-curricular activities in preschool. As analysts of social interaction frequently point out, methods of

participating in social activities are methods of producing a sense of social structure (Baker, 1991; Garfinkel, 1967;

Sacks, 1972). Hence, the children’s methods of accomplishing educational activities within ‘free play’ provide a way

of producing a sense of the educational order. We suggest that by observing these events we are able to examine the

children’s own understandings of how the relations between childhood and teacherhood are worked out in and for

instructional activities (cf. Baker, 1991). We address this question by fleshing out in some degree of interactional detail

the generic interactional resources, as well as the specifically instructional routines, through which the children engage

in accomplishing distinct educational activities.

5. Methodological considerations

5.1. Mundane, institutional and members’ own notions of play

The notion of children’s play is commonsensically applied to activities that are typically not initiated by adults, or

that do not follow an agenda that has been handed down to children by an adult. Play is taken to be a more or less

spontaneous and loosely organised activity. By referring to something as play, people often signal that non-serious

business is at hand. In many respects, play is seen as subsidiary to other types of activities.

In contrast, researchers who examine children’s play activities typically find that play is neither inconsequential nor

disorganised. In fact, sociological and educational studies of play tend to view such activities as a hotbed for peer

group socialization; a process through which young humans produce their own social orders and relate these orders to

those of the society at large (see, e.g., Corsaro, 1985; Cromdal, 2006; Schwartzman, 1978; Thorell, 1998).

Developmentally oriented researchers often view play as an arena in which children explore concepts, language and

develop a whole range of mental as well as social skills (e.g., Garvey, 1980).

Furthermore, in early child education, play has become something of a professional instrument: preschool teachers

initiate and engage children in playful activities as a way of working towards curricular goals (Lpfo 98, 1998). Hence,

mundane notions of play as something spontaneous, informal and inherently insignificant only partly apply to

preschool life. In Swedish preschools the term ‘free play’ refers to children’s activities that take place outside

instructional events (Ivarsson, 2003). Thus, ‘free play’ is contrasted to the strictly educational business of the

preschool. It is what children do, when they aren’t being subjected to teaching. In preschool practice, ‘free play’ is used

as an administrative term for specific periods of the day—it refers to certain slots in the daily schedule (Strandell,

1994).

Both the mundane and the professional notions of play have one thing in common: they refer to what children

do from outside of the actual events they describe. As such, they provide an extrinsic account of what is going on,

without engaging with the participants own concerns, as displayed in and through their situated conduct. They

provide a gloss for a whole spectrum of social activities. The pragmatic value of this gloss for purposes of

mundane interaction is of course indisputable, as there are surely very few people who do not have an idea of what

children do when they ‘play’. However, for the purposes of examining children’s activities from within actual

events – events in which distinct communicative projects and various social concerns are pursued, displayed and

jointly negotiated – the term ‘play’ is mostly too imprecise to render a relevant account of the actual practice.

Moreover, it is potentially misleading, as we occasionally find that for the children themselves, the practice they

engage in lacks any of the criteria we use to define play: it is hard work, it is dead-serious and bears profound

consequences for the participant’s social relations. Glossing such activities ‘play’, with all the connotations of

light-hearted insignificance, we risk dismissing a priori the real-life concerns of the very same persons whose

social life we have taken upon us to study. In short, we risk ending up with an ironic account of events, informed by

folklore conceptions of young people, rather than learning something about the social orders they produce while

going about their joint activities.

For this reason, it should be noted that our reference to ‘play’ in categorizing the data on which our analyses are

based, is not meant as an analytical account of what the participants are doing. Rather, it appeals to the institutional

description of the events we have recorded: ‘free play’ is a scheduled activity, and consequently anything that the

children do during this time will be treated for all practical purposes by the staff (and occasionally by the children

themselves) as ‘play’. We will return to discuss this issue in relation to the analyses in the final section of this article.


5.2. Data and settings

The present study draws on data from two corpuses of young children’s interaction in preschool. The Australian

corpus entails video-recordings of various play events taking place a suburban preschool in one of the major cities. A

total of twenty-two 4 years old children took part in the recorded activities. The children at the preschool have all

recently immigrated from China, Hong-Kong and Vietnam, and they have all had less than a year’s exposure to

English. Although a few of the staff were native speakers of some of the children’s home languages, the language

policy of the preschool promoted the use of English in talk between staff and children. During the period of fieldwork,

these staff would occasionally address children in their native language. Notably, this would occur outside the formal

educational activities, thus contributing to the construction of English as the language of instruction.

The second corpus is part of a larger project focusing on children’s interaction in a multilingual preschool in

Sweden, where three languages – Swedish, English and Spanish – were spoken daily in a variety of contexts, including

instructional group activities as well as free play (cf., Bjork-Willen, 2007, 2008). In total 24 children aged 3–5 years

participated in the study. The children represent a variety of language backgrounds: beside the three official languages

at the preschool, languages such as German, French, Arabic, Suryoyo,1 Latvian, Tamil and Farsi were spoken in the

children’s families. Given this linguistic plurality and the fact that Swedish was the one common language that the

children were exposed to outside the preschool, it also served as lingua franca within the preschool. This said, the

actual exposure to Swedish would vary greatly between the children. While a mere part of the children are bi- or

multilingual from very early age, with Swedish as one of their working languages, some are newcomers to Sweden and

have had very little experience of Swedish before enrolling the preschool.

The data were digitalized and indexed with a focus on the type of activities that went on in the preschools and the

languages used within those activities. Transcriptions were prepared using conversation analytic notations (cf.

Atkinson and Heritage, 1984), with minor modifications to fit the bilingual nature of the data. All names of persons and

places have been changed to preserve participants’ anonymity.

6. How education seeps into ‘free play’: three preschool activities

Previous work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis on schooling tends to treat educational institutions

as ‘orally accountable phenomena [. . .] comprising ways of speaking, which exhibit and constitute the distinctively

identifying character of the structure/institution comprising education’ (Watson, 1992:260–261). The present analysis

aims to show how young preschool children invoke and construct through their talk and nonvocal actions an

accountably educational order of interaction. We examine three empirical examples of ‘free play’, each of which

instantiates the children’s understanding and construction of a distinct type of instructional activity which we have

called ‘object labelling activities’, ‘self-presentation routines’ and ‘bookreading’.

6.1. Object labelling activities

Our first example originates from the Australian corpus. Two 4-year-old children, Britney and Michael, are seated

on the floor in front of a ‘‘flannel-board’’.2 They are playing with a set of paper animals that were used the day before

during sharing time, when the teacher introduced the group to the nursery rhyme ‘Old MacDonald had a farm’. As the

children would go through all the animals in the rhyme, the teacher would successively fixate each animal onto the

board.

Throughout the recordings, Britney and Michael would typically play using their mother tongue, Hakka, a Chinese

variety, chiefly used in the Southern provinces of China, Taiwan and East Timor. Accordingly, this is the language they

were speaking just prior to the excerpt’s beginning.3 The transcript starts as Britney picks up a paper-horse from a

bunch of pictures that she holds in her hand.


1 In Sweden, Arabic and Kurdish are common languages among immigrants from Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. The largest group, however,

define their mother tongue as Suryoyo, which is an Aramaic language (Bjorklund, 1981).2 A flannel-board is a panel covered with flannelette. It is frequently used in early education instead of a blackboard, which is used for wtiting and

drawing. Instead, the flanelette board allows the teacher to attach a variety of figures made of paper and flannelette for instance to illustrate a story.3 Due to the surrounding noise from other ongoing activities, the children’s talk in Hakka proved inaudible for a consulted native speaker.

Britney holds up a paper horse and asks Michael to name it. Rather than waiting for a reply, however, she immediately

produces another nickname address, followed by a markedly prolonged vocalisation of ‘an:::’ which is immediately

repaired as she produces the answer to her own query: ‘a horse’. This move identifies the activity and establishes its

procedural organisation: one participant shows an object and asks about its proper name, while the other is expected to

supply that name. By offering the correct answer in overlap with Britney, Michael shows that he is familiar with the

procedure. His response is received with an agreement token and a repetition of the correct answer.

Britney’s initial instruction in lines 1-2 and her receipt of Michael’s reply in line 7 can thus be seen to invoke the

procedure of the educational activity that took place in the group the day before. One of the central features of this

procedure is that the interaction takes the shape of an IRE-sequence (Bellack et al., 1966; Sinclair and Coulthard,

1975; Mehan, 1979). In line with the organization of the ‘Old MacDonald’ activity during sharing time on the day

before, it is the teacher’s task to ask the initial question, as well as to comment on or evaluate the students’ response that

the initial question occasioned. In line 7, Britney’s receipt of Michael’s answer takes the shape of a

confirmation + repetition. This comprises a typical format for teachers’ feedback moves, through which a student’s

answer is not merely acknowledged as correct, but also highlighted on behalf of a greater audience of the classroom.

Hence, the organization of interaction between the two children in our present example not merely adopts a format for

turn-taking, typical of educational activities, but it also invokes an appropriate set of roles and relationships, with

Britney taking on the role as teacher and Michael acting as student.

A further feature central to this activity concerns the children’s language choice. Like many nursery rhymes, the

‘Old MacDonald’ served as an educational resource geared towards children’s learning of English. Hence,


participation in this activity implied teacher’s as well as children’s use of English terms. Considering that Britney and

Michael were speaking Hakka just prior to Britney’s initiation of the activity, the switch into English demonstrates

their orientation to the instructional feature of the ‘Old MacDonald’ activity, and the normative order of the

educational exchanges at the preschool in general.

Returning now to the transcript, the procedure is carried out once more with the same paper figure, resulting in the

horse being finally fixated onto the flannel board. This time, Britney’s receipt of Michael’s turn is minimal, and she

proceeds to initiate a new round of questioning, picking up a paper hay carriage (lines 10-11). Michael’s reply is

inaudible on tape, but we can see in line 13 that Britney too orients to it as problematic as she dissatisfying latches onto

Michel’s turn and produces a determined reply: ‘‘boarder’’. Clearly, this is not the correct term for the horse carriage

and we will refrain from speculating about what word Britney may have had in mind. Suffice it to note in passing that

by choosing an English word, rather than resorting to Hakka, Britney further orients to – and acts upon – the normative

organizational feature of the ‘Old MacDonald’ routine. We should also note that Michael does not seem to treat

Britney’s turn as problematic and duly repeats the term she offered (line 14). This time Britney does not produce a

verbal evaluation – perhaps indicating her awareness of the term being incorrect – but terminates the sequence by

attaching the paper carriage onto the flannel board.

The next paper animal that Britney picks up is a pig. Since Michael does not respond immediately on her formal

question: ‘what’s this?’ (line 16), she again, produces the answer herself, proclaiming in a loud voice—‘‘A KIG’’.

Michael then offers the correct alternative, ‘‘a pig’’, in line 20. Through this other-initiated other-repair (Schegloff

et al., 1977), Michael orients to Britney’s mispronunciation of the word. According to a line of conversation analytic

studies of mundane interaction, this is generally the most dispreferred form of repair (e.g., Schegloff et al., 1977;

McHoul, 1990). However, both authors stress that this pattern may not necessarily apply to other specific speech

exchange systems, such as for instance instructional exchanges in school or even in the family. Nonetheless, a similar

preference organization was noted by Seedhouse (2004) in ‘form-and-accuracy’-focused interaction in second-

language education. In contrast, some recent studies of second-language interaction as well as talk in educational

contexts have shown this type of repair to occur without signs of dispreference (Kurhila, 2001; Lethi-Eklund, 2002).

Indeed, some analysts have even proposed that this type of repair may be the most educationally efficient way of

handling participants’ trouble with talk’s production (Seedhouse, 2004; Slotte-Luttge, 2005). These studies typically

refer to cases in which the teacher, or alternatively the more competent (native) speaker, corrects the erroneous speech

production of a less competent participant.

The present case is a bit more complex: while it can clearly be argued that the interaction takes place between peers,

it should be noted that in the current play episode, Britney and Michael have established a local order according to

which Britney is acting as teacher while Michael is taking on the role as pupil. This is particularly evident in the

distribution of tasks between the two of them, with Britney asking the questions and Michael supplying the answers, as

well as in Britney’s ownership of the pedagogic artefacts. In other words, within the activity framework that they have

constructed (and are continuously sustaining), the pupil has just corrected the teacher. There is some indication in the

data that Michael’s move is treated as problematic within this activity framework. In line 21, Britney repeats the

correct form that Michael has proffered, which is a typical way of closing a repair sequence: the correction is

confirmed through repetition (Schegloff et al., 1977). However, Britney produces the corrected term very loudly and in

a rather authoritative voice, and action that seems designed to restore her local authority as teacher. And, indeed, in line

22 we find Michael repeating the very term that he himself produced, thus going along with the local distribution of

rights and obligations within the current activity framework.

Britney then repeats the word twice (line 23) but this time Michael does not reply. Britney then holds up the paper

pig close to Michael’s face and says something angrily in Hakka. As Britney’s turn is inaudible due to surrounding

noise, we can only speculate about the nature of her action. However, judging from her tone of voice and her nonvocal

actions, it would seem that she is not happy about Michael’s actions—or lack thereof. Also, Michael’s response is

clearly submissive: he looks down and produces a quiet ‘yes’, thus either agreeing or complying with Britney’s

previous turn at talk. It is interesting to note in passing that whereas Britney switched to Hakka in line 25, Michael

chooses to respond in English, possibly still acting upon the normatively the educational context of the activity.

However, Michael’s submissive response does not resolve the adversative atmosphere, and in line 29 Britney again

repeats the word ‘pig’ and shakes the paper pig in an irritated gesture, demanding Michael’s compliance. Again, he

produces the second pair part and again Britney raises her voice and repeats the word, this time prolonging the vocal

sound and adding an article: ‘‘A PI:G’’. Such series of recycled initiations - responses without the terminating


evaluation part are similar to a didactic method, common in language classrooms, known as a ‘language drill’ (cf.

Cekaite and Aronsson, 2005). Through such a procedure, learners of a foreign language are given repeated opportunity

to practice their pronunciation. This might seem odd in the current example, as the reader will recall that it was Britney,

not Michael who made the original error of pronunciation, and it was Michael himself who produced the correct form.

However, on the basis of Britney’s interactional work in lines 21–32, we would like to suggest that this is precisely

what is being done: as part of restoring the local educational order within the current activity frame (that is, restoring

herself as teacher/expert and Michael as pupil/novice), Britney works at transforming her own error into a language

drill sequence through which she is able to scaffold Michael’s performance of pronouncing the word ‘‘pig’’. In lines

34–35 finally, Britney approves verbally of Michael’s previous action and attaches the paper pig to the board. She then

turns to look at Michael, who meets her gaze, smiling. This brings the language drill episode to an end.

Following upon this joint resolution, Britney picks up a paper cow and produces a new initiating question, to which

she herself offers a response in line 41, then repeats again, holding the paper cow right in front of Michael’s face (lines

42–43). Clearly, Michael treats this as a request to follow suit, and produces in line 44 the correct term after which the

whole sequence is repeated in lines 46–49 (again resembling a ‘language drill’ routine), before Britney terminates the

cow sequence by approving of Michael’s performance and fixating the paper cow onto the board.

To sum up, we have focused on some organizational aspects of this play episode, focusing of the two children’s prac-

tical methods of performing a variety of a previous instructional activity. Firstly, we have shown that Britney and Michael

initially established a set of roles and responsibilities, crucial to the performance of this and many other educational

activities that took place at the preschool. Accordingly, within the activity framework that Britney and Michael cons-

tructed in the above episode, it was the teacher’s job to administer the paper animals, to ask questions as well as to evaluate

the student’s responses. The sequential organization of these role-appropriate actions overwhelmingly took the shape of

an IRE-sequence. Furthermore, we have also discussed an instance of the pupil correcting the teacher’s error. While such

instances occasionally take place in instructional activities, they need not pose a threat to the institutionalised relation-

ships of the educational setting (cf. Bjork-Willen, 2008). However, in our present example, Michael’s correction of

Britney was treated as a violation of the local educational order that the two of them were jointly constructing, and we have

shown how Britney dealt with this in her role as teacher by inserting into this instructional framework another activity

typical of language education: a language drill routine. As Michael fully complied with this project, Britney was able to

quickly restore her position as teacher. Crucially, what is displayed here is these children’s understanding of the roles and

responsibilities operating between teachers and pupils within formal educational activities.

A final organizational feature of the current episode has to do with the children’s choice of English, a language they

almost never use to interact with each other in other play activities. In organizing this event in the ways outlined above,

Britney and Michael show their sensitivity to the normative character of instructional activities and their ability to

incorporate and act upon some central features of educational order into their own activity. The issue of language

choice as a central aspect of children’s playing at doing multilingual education will be further explored in our next

example, taken from the Swedish corpus.

6.2. Self–introduction routines

In the Swedish preschool, the 4- and 5-year-old children engage in different language teaching activities designed

to promote the learning of a second (or third) language through play. Such activities typically take place within the

realm of the Spanish group (‘spanskagruppen’) and the English group (‘engelskagruppen’), which are scheduled

several times a week. In these ‘language groups’, the bilingual Spanish/Swedish teacher introduces Spanish

vocabulary and simple phrases. Similarly, the bilingual Swedish/English teacher introduces some basics of English

communication. During these group events, staff and children mainly focus their talk on certain themes, often ones that

have recently been introduced within the Swedish curricular activities.

The excerpt below presents an instance of play that is modelled on an exercise from the Spanish group on the day

before, in which the children were practicing introduction routines (presenting oneself by name and asking for the

interlocutor’s name) in Spanish. The present activity involves five 5-years old girls (Lisa, Elsa, Sally, Katarina and

Olivia) who are seated in a circle on the playroom floor. Their legs are stretched out in front of them and spread open

wide so that the floor space between forms a star-shaped play area in which they pass around a plastic ball. As a player

passes the ball, she will first say her own name, then ask for the recipient’s name. The excerpt begins just as Elsa

receives the ball.


Rather than introducing herself upon receiving the ball, Elsa asks for a co-participant’s name (line 1). Lisa corrects

Elsa’s performance by supplying Elsa’s own name, and Elsa acknowledges the correction producing her name in line

3. In line 4 Katarina, Lisa collaborates with Lisa in scaffolding Elsa through the next step of the introduction routine:

asking about the name of the person who is receiving the ball, and slating Sally as next recipient.4 Elsa duly complies

with these instructions and sends the ball off to Sally. Upon receiving the ball, Sally hesitates and produces the full

introduction routine in Swedish (line 12). Katarina immediately offers a correction, quickly producing the Spanish

form in line 13. However, before Katarina has finished, Lisa switches to Swedish and protests about the position of

Sally’s legs. Lisa explains that Sally may obstruct the trajectory of the ball and illustrates her point by raising both

hands to show how the ball would have to be bounced over Sally’s knees.

In other words, both Katarina and Elsa orient to Sally’s receiving of the ball as a faulty move: Katarina targets

Sally’s choice of language by correctively offering the routine in Spanish, and Lisa complains – in Swedish – about

Sally’s bodily orientation to the play field. In response, Sally stretches out her legs (line 19), but does not carry our a

repair of her language choice—possibly because the relevant sequential slot following on Katarina’s correction has

been occupied by Lisa’s complaint (lines 14 through 18). In fact, Sally does not complete the routine at all—she has

only said ‘‘my name is’’. Instead, she quietly rolls the ball to Lisa, without completing the second part of the routine.

As Lisa receives the ball from Sally, she produces a series of clearly articulated, almost exaggerated gestures pointing

with her both hands at herself and expressively telling her own name followed by the question ‘‘como the llamas tu?’’

(‘‘what’s your name?’’) as she puts both her hands on the ball and passes it to Elsa (lines 22–26). Clearly, Lisa copies the

overly expressive multimodal action format through which the Spanish teacher introduced the introduction game during

Spanish group. In so doing Lisa can be said to have embodied the teacher’s instructional actions from the day before. As

Goodwin (1998) observed, children make coordinated use of gestures as well as vocal pitch ‘‘. . . to build and display

themselves as social actors with specific embodied characteristics, a habit of power’’ (Goodwin, 1998:35).

As Lisa completes her pass to Elsa (who had just had the ball), she immediately calls it a mistake (lines 25–27), and she

uses her right hand to point at Katarina, possibly to indicate the intended recipient of the pass. Katrina’s next action seems

to orient to this interpretation, as she collaborates with Lisa in attempting to persuade Elsa to give up the ball (line 30).

Moreover in lines 28–29, Katarina reaches out towards Elsa, as if to claim the ball, upon which Elsa loudly protests,

invoking the rules (line 33). Katarina retracts her move and accounts for her action by pointing out that Lisa had in fact

made a wrong pass (line 35), possibly implying that this in itself comprises a breach in the game order, and has to be

immediately resolved. At this point in the argument, Olivia, who had not taken an active part in the playing so far, slowly

creeps out of the circle ending her participation in this episode.


4 We may note that Sally self-selects as recipient of the ball already in line 6, but it is not until Lisa finishes her instruction non-verbally (lines 8-9),

and at the same time confirms Sally’s aspired recipiency, that Elsa actually passes the ball.

In contrast to the object labelling activity in the previous extract, which was based on a crucially teacher-led

activity, the present episode is based on an exercise that took place between the pupils, who once they have been

introduced to the self-presentation routine, did not necessarily require the presence of a teacher. In light of this, it

is interesting to see that Lisa and Katarina nonetheless take up the role as teacher(s), and act upon the rights and

obligations that are associated with an instructor’s position. For instance, we have seen how Lisa and Katarina

engage in an instructional practice known as scaffolding (line 2; lines 4 and 7), how Katarina corrects Sally’s

choice of language (line 13), how Lisa instructs Sally how to sit properly for the purposes of the game (lines 14–

18), and finally how Lisa performs the full routine in a clearly instructional, almost overexplicit way, using

markedly amplified bodily demonstrations as well as markedly articulated pronunciation.

Another significant aspect of the girls’ conduct, relevant for the educational features of this activity, has to do with the

girls’ language choice. We have seen that while the girls systematically issued orders, complaints, comments in Swedish,

the self-introductions were performed strictly in Spanish. The former may be accounted for by the observation that in our

data, Swedish was the language that the girls would use for all mundane communicative purposes. Their use of Spanish to

perform the self-introductions may have an explanation in the fact that they were performing a language exercise that they

had learned in the Spanish group. By using Spanish strictly for this purpose, the girls display their orientation to the

normative order of Spanish group activities—as Katarina’s correction in line 13 clearly illustrates.

In our final example, we discuss a slightly different play episode in which the children’s use of two languages

follows a more complex interactional pattern. We will also discuss at greater length some central nonvocal action types

through which the players accomplish the activity.

6.3. Doing bookreading

Our last extract, drawn from the Swedish corpus, presents two 3-year-old boys, Agustin and Gustavo, who are sitting

next to each other in the preschool’s ‘reading sofa’ which the teacher occupy during reading events, and flipping through

the pages of a Teletubby book. The two boys both come from Spanish speaking families, but as much of the overall

interaction at the preschool proceeds in Swedish, they tend to alternate between the languages when they play with each

other. As the transcript starts, Agustin is holding the book. Having just browsed through the whole book, he stops at the

last page and comments on a suite of miniature pictures showing other titles from the same book series.


As Agustin announces that he has finished reading the book, Gustavo claims his turn and takes over the book (lines

4–5). Agustin agrees to this, but points out in Spanish that he did the reading fast, possibly urging Gustavo not to take

too long. Gustavo then begins reading in Spanish, directing Agustin’s attention to Laa-laa’s ball5 on the page by

holding up the book towards him and exclaiming: ‘‘o:::y mira’’ (line 10). He then looks up at Agustin and points to the

book: ‘‘ves asi(s)’’ (line 12) and ‘‘la pelota es asi’’ (look here look the ball is like this; line 15). By soliciting and

directing Agustin’s attention in this way, Gustavo‘s actions initiate a reading event and propose a working order for this

activity: Gustavo will handle the book and show Agustin its content (counting as reading within this activity

framework), while Agustin will take on the task as audience, as recipient of the book story. Gustavo’s quick glance at

Agustin, while he places the book in his own lap, allows him to check that his partner is in fact focusing on the book,

and that he has accepted the suggested division of labour.

However, in lines 16–17 Agustin points in the book and joins in the narrating of the story by announcing a shift of

focus to another object in the book, ‘‘oh sen blev det sa mira’’ (‘‘and then it went like this mira’’). He then immediately

proceeds to move on to the next item moving his hand over the page ‘‘sa mi::::’’ (‘‘there mi::::’’, lines 18–19), but

Gustavo takes over the narration by pointing to the page and commenting on the illustration in Spanish: ‘‘pat- pateo

esta’’ (‘‘kic- kicked’’, line 20), then by switching into Swedish for the discourse marker ‘‘oh sen’’ (‘‘and then’’) and

turning the page in line 24.

Let us consider this brief exchange in some interactional detail. Note that with the exception for the attention

particle ‘‘mira’’, Agustin’s turn in line 16 is produced in Swedish. In other words, he chooses a divergent language to

produce the turn through which he takes over from Gustavo the so-far Spanish based telling of the book’s story. There

is clear evidence in the data that Gustavo treats this move as competitive, as an intrusion of his responsibilities as

reader. Let us first note that Gustavo begins his turn in line 20 in a sequential environment, where it is demonstrably

clear that Agustin is about to continue his bid at reading the book, his hand moving across the page. Secondly, by

continuing to read in Spanish, Gustavo is disaffiliating – on the level of language choice – with Agustin’s ongoing

action. Note that in this specific sequential location, where the both participants are making claims for the

conversational floor, code-switching may work as a turn-competitive device, (Cromdal 2001). Thirdly, the content of

Gustavo’s turn is a comment on the illustration on the book’s page.6 Hence, it is clearly produced as an alternative to

whatever story that Agustin is about to tell in relation to this page. In this sense, Gustavo’s narration of the storyline in

the initial phase of line 20 is produced as competitive with respect to Agustin’s narration, and we can see that it is

indeed successful in that Agustin abandons his turn prior to completion. Having secured the floor, the remaining part of

Gustavo’s turn is designed to remain in control of the book as well as the telling of its unfolding story, as he

emphatically produces in Swedish the continuation token ‘‘oh sen’’ (‘‘and then’’), turns the page and begins a pointing

movement directed towards the page.

Clearly, what we are dealing with here is a beginning competition related to the distribution of the rights and

responsibilities in this reading event. More specifically, the competition this far concerns the right to read and narrate a

story based on the pages of the book. The book thus constitutes a crucial artefact in this activity, and we should note that in

lines 25 and 26, Agustin tugs at the book, pointing at a page and demanding that Gustav pay attention to its content. Note

also that this turn is produced fully in Spanish, which again diverges from the sequential implicature of the previous turn,

which ended in Swedish (cf. Auer, 1984; Cromdal, 2000, 2001 for further discussions of sequential implicature in relation

to language choice). Gustavo produces a brief token of agreement, holds up the book and turns it towards the camera, then

turns it back towards Agustin and proceeds to the next event in the story directing his partner’s attention to the book: ‘‘oh

sen titta har’’ (‘‘and then look here’’; line 27). By first showing the book for the camera, Gustavo is able to regain control of

the book without directly confronting Agustin, who was just attempting to take over its ownership. Considering that the

boys are still competing for the role of the narrator, it is interesting to note the non-confrontational design of Gustavo’s

actions. Further to this, we may note that the turn-initial Spanish agreement token ‘‘si’’, casts Gustavo’s actions as

affiliative, both on the level of language choice as well as lexical content—he acknowledges Agustin’s contribution in the


5 The Teletubbies is originally a TV-show (on which the present book is based), that was developed and produced by the BBC with an explicit aim

to reach a very young audience. In short outline, it features four fictional characters, each one equipped with an in-built TV-receiver and screen,

living in an artificial landscape. Each Teletubby has a single piece of belonging, which they carry with them almost at all times. For this reason, each

object almost serves to symbolize its owner. Accordingly, Tinky-Winky carries a red handbag; Dipsy wears a tophat; Laa-laa has a red ball, and

finally Po rides a scooter.6 This page shows Lala with her ball. While in principal this is a speculative claim, it is not a too far a shot to hear Gustavo’s comment about

kicking as related to this illustration.

same language as it was produced, then swiftly moves on to pursue his own agenda, now using a contrastive language.

Agustin initiates his reply with an expanded attention token (‘‘hey mira’’) then commenting on the illustration, ‘‘no

podria corer’’ (‘‘he couldn’t run’’). Rather than acknowledging Gustavo’s prior turn then, Agustin simply calls for his

partner’s attention and produces a competitive bid for the reading of the story. In response, we find Gustavo producing a

minimal token of acknowledgement ‘‘8mm8’’, then more emphatically announcing his next episode in the story ‘‘och

SEN’’ (line 31), at the same time as he lays the book down in his lap.

Let us consider the differential design of the two boys actions; while they both seem to make claims for the right to

‘read’ the book for the other, Gustavo pursues his agenda by consequently acknowledging Agustin’s contributions,

although without complying with his requests. This involves the use of such interactional means as minimal agreement

tokens and affiliative language choice (line 27) or language neutral vocal tokens (line 31). Through these means,

Gustavo produces his actions as non-confrontational, if not compliant. Agustin, on the other hand, does not

acknowledge Gustavo’s actions, and tailors his own turns in a much more overtly competitive way. We will suggest at

this point that this contrastive packaging of actions has to do with the ownership of the book: being the current

bookholder, Gustavo has an interest in keeping open conflict at bay, whereas Agustin chooses a more openly

confrontational involvement to gain (or indeed regain7) reading rights within this joint activity.

In line with this interpretation, we find Agustin make another demand for Gustavo’s attention in line 33, again

without acknowledging his partner’s previous turn and by using a contrastive language. And again, Gustavo responds

affiliatively, this time by nodding, as he is having a brief sneezing attack. At this, Agustin immediately attempts to take

the book (line 38), but Gustavo manages to pull the book back and turns the page producing another story-oriented

continuation token. This time however, the action is oriented to his partner, as Gustavo holds the open book right in

front of Agustin. Indeed, we would suggest that the prosodically upgraded continuation token (‘‘OH SEN"’’) is

produced to contextualize Gustavo’s action as other-oriented, that is, as an invitation for Agustin to read the next part

of the story, and it is precisely this on this interpretation that Agustin acts in line 41, as he points to the book and says

‘‘paso este’’ (‘‘this happened’’), an action that Gustavo immediately confirms in line 43.

With this exchange Agustin finally gains the right to participate as co-reader – or co-narrator – of the storyline in the

book. In line 46 Agustin suggests two new events in the storyline, which he identifies in Spanish by pointing to the

illustration of the current page. As he starts pointing, Gustavo gently retrieves the book, which he has been holding out

towards the other boy (cf. line 40). Agustin then asks what happens next and attempts to turn the page himself (lines

48–49), but it is Gustavo who finally turns the page in line 50. Clearly, Agustin’s participation rights in the activity do

not include turning the pages, or otherwise operating the book. The boys then exchange a few brief comments in

relation to the new page (lines 51 through 53).

Clearly, in the last few exchanges both boys display an orientation to collaboration and consensus as to participation

rights and the division of work in the reading activity. However, starting on line 56, we may again note an increasingly

competitive orientation in the boys’ packaging of their actions. Here, we see Gustavo markedly retracting the book and

quickly turning two pages while announcing two new story episodes in Swedish, then commenting on an illustration

(possibly of a cat; lines 61–63). This time, the competitiveness seems to concern the management of the book.

Accordingly, we find Agustin make another move for the book, trying to turn the pages. In response, Gustavo takes

hold of his friend’s hand and gently but firmly moves it away from the book (line 68). He then turns the page himself,

and announces another episode in the story, ‘‘oh SEN’’ (‘‘and THEN’’; line 70), which again works as an invitation for

Agustin to present a new story component, ‘‘paso este’’ (‘‘this happened’’; line 71). Gustavo then checks whether they

are orienting to the same feature of the illustration by pointing to the book and asking ‘‘este a’’ (‘‘this’’, line 73), to

which Agustin replies in the negative, pointing instead to another part of the page (line 74). He then goes on to point to

several items on the page as if he was counting and concludes that there are many of ‘them’ in the illustration.

In this extended extract, the two boys clearly work towards a jointly acceptable organization of the book-reading

event, in which Gustavo starts out as the principal reader, while Agustin continuously attempts to increase his

participation rights. At first the competition mainly concerns Agustin’s participation in the reading (lines 16 though

25). After this right is secured, the two boys orient their actions towards collaboration and agreement (lines 41 through

53), until Agustin’s more insistent attempts to join the turning of pages result in another series of more competitively


7 Agustin’s attempts to contribute to the reading of the book suggest that while he did give Gustavo the book, he may not be prepared to waive his

user rights altogether. Indeed, such an interpretation may find support in line 5, in which Agustin indirectly appeals to Gustavo not to take too long

with the book.

oriented actions (lines 57 through 59). Interestingly, one observable feature of the boys’ competitive orientation is the

use of divergent language choice, especially in Agustin’s attempts to gain a more active part in the reading project. In

the more consensus oriented phase (lines 41 through 53) no language alternation takes place between the boys’ turns at

talk, suggesting that for these children language choice forms part of the resources they have at hand for building

competitive or even oppositional actions (cf. Cromdal, 2004).

Let us now consider some specific educational features of this bookreading activity. While it is clear that the two 3-

year-old boys are not actually reading the text in the book, but merely commenting on the illustrations, we argue that

they are engaged in ‘doing bookreading’ (cf. Simonsson, 2004). The main thrust of the argument that this is essentially

a reading activity is rather simple, and rests on a members’ perspective of their own conduct: already at the outset, the

boys construe this activity as ‘reading’ (line 6). Furthermore, we argue that the boys’ activity is modelled on group

reading events that frequently took place at the preschool. The first feature of this is the location: by occupying the

reading sofa in the reading corner of the preschool, the boys’ activity is geographically contextualized as a reading

event. Moreover, while not actually reading any text, the boys are clearly using a book and doing so, we might argue,

competently enough to establish and sustain the activity framework of a reading event. As Baker (1991) points out,

although bookreading activities in early education often involve talking about the pictures in the books, rather than

about the text on its pages, such practices nonetheless ‘‘illustrate methods used to orient children to text in school, and

are examples of early introductions to school-literate culture’’ (Baker, 1991:166).

In analysing the previous two extracts, we have shown how the children’s play activities are informed by certain

educational orders, and how the players exploit a range of verbal as well as nonvocal educational routines through

which they are able to create education-relevant activity frameworks. We are now in a position to point to a few such

routines in our current example. Firstly, we have seen that the boys frequently use the discourse marker ‘‘och sen’’

(‘‘and then’’). While clearly a rudimentary technique, this verbal routine allows the boys to accomplish something that

the teachers overwhelmingly do in group reading activities: to establish coherence between the different parts of the

storyline in the book. In the present activity, this technique typically announces a next story component, which is then

delivered by pointing to an illustration in the book and often by a verbal comment like ‘‘paso este’’ (‘‘this happened’’).

Moreover, the ‘‘och sen’’ technique was also used by Gustavo, the principal owner of the book, as a ‘page-turning

device’, through which he would announce and initiate the turning of the book’s pages.

Another set of interactional devices that we have observed in the transcript has to do with recipiency of the book’s

story. Here, we have seen how Agustin frequently points to the illustrations in the book, and that his pointing is often

coordinated with such verbal utterances as ‘‘mira’’ (‘‘look’’; lines 16 and 25) and ‘‘pasar’’ (‘‘happened’’; lines 41 and

46). This exploitation of the semiotic fields (Goodwin, 2000) relevant to the activity allows him to take a more active

part in the reading of the story by configuring both boys’ joint attention to some elements in the book (Melander,

2004), and crucially, by delaying Gustavo’s turning of the pages (e.g., lines 37–46).

The distribution of roles and relationships, and their corresponding norms and expectations within the activity

framework of the reading event, is much less clear-cut than in the two previous extracts. While it can be claimed that

throughout the episode Gustavo is the principal reader of the book, and accordingly the one who physically handles the

book, we have seen how this division of tasks is subject to continuous negotiation between the two participants, with

Agustin continuously trying to gain discourse space within the production of the storyline (i.e., the reading) and

making increasingly competitive attempts to access the book itself. A further organizational aspect of this reading

activity has to do with the boys’ direction of attention, as evidenced by their gaze. While Agustin’s facial orientation is

overwhelmingly focused on the book, we may note that Gustavo looks up from the book on several occasions and turns

to look at Agustin (lines 13; 35; 39). With the exception of line 35, these gaze movements are coordinated with

Gustavo’s introduction of new story elements (cf. Melander, 2004), or turning of pages: ‘‘ves asi(s)’’ (line 12) ‘‘la

pelota es asi’’ (‘‘look here the ball is like this’’; line 15), ‘‘sı och sen titta har’’ (‘‘yes and then look here’’; lines 27–28),

‘‘och SEN’’ (‘‘and THEN’’; lines 57–59). Through these minutely coordinated multimodal actions Gustavo can be

seen to check on Agustin’s participation in the recipiency of the story; to ensure that his partner is ‘doing recipiency’ of

the reading. Clearly, this is a type of practice in which teachers frequently engage when reading a book for a group of

children. In our example, this practice is part-and-parcel of Gustavo’s performance as the principal reader of the book.

In other words, the current activity is unmistakably modelled on the previous teacher-led reading events, and our

analysis has pointed to some essential features of educational practice in the boys’ interaction, as well as highlighted

some noteworthy differences. In discussing these similarities and differences, we have shown how the boys draw upon

and negotiate for their own purposes the organisational order of bookreading events at the preschool.


7. Concluding discussion

Docendo discimus—‘We learn by teaching’. Through this device, the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca

blurred the boundary between teaching and learning. Our analyses have highlighted how young children in bilingual

preschool environments stage and perform a variety of instructional activities within the realm of ‘free play’, that is,

within interactional events that are institutionally pre-defined as specifically non-instructional.

Our concern with the children’s own accomplishment of educational order(s) in free play activities is grounded

in previous interaction oriented studies of classroom practice, which suggest that in participating in instructional

events, students learn much more than curricular subject matter (e.g., Edwards and Mercer, 1987; Heap, 1990;

Mehan, 1979). Hence, studying students’ methods of participating in and constructing instructional activities is of

vital importance for our understanding of how learning takes place in the institutional context of education. We

argue that free play activities of the kind we have discussed above may be examined for the institutional knowledge

they encompass on behalf of the children. By attending to the organisational details of the preschool children’s

activities, we have shown how they orient to the features that they know to constitute a specific instructional

activity, and how in orienting to those features they make this knowledge observable for one another and thereby

available for analysis.

One subset of organisational features that demonstrate the children’s orientation to the institutional order of

instruction activities has to do with the distribution of local identities and the tasks, rights and responsibilities

associated to those identities. Here, our analyses of the interactional routines, through which for instance

questions are being asked, answered and evaluated (cf. excerpts 1 and 2) or through which participants are being

scaffolded to the expected performance of relevant actions (excerpt 2), point to the children’s invocation and

construction of the institutional identities ‘teacher’ and ‘pupil’. The normative aspects of the rights and

responsibilities associated to these identities are given procedural visibility particularly in the violation of locally

expected actions, as in the case of Michael’s correction of Britney’s mispronunciation or the word ‘‘pig’’ (excerpt

1), which within the current activity framework amounted to the pupil correcting the teacher. Britney’s (and

Michael’s) elaborated restoration of the formalised relation between the two participants testifies to the children’s

notions of institutional relationships and their procedural significance in carrying out the object labelling activity

as a formal instructional event.

At the heart of formal instructional activities in educational settings is – besides the organisation of verbal actions –

the management of certain physical artefacts. Hence, the operation of the black/whiteboard, slide projectors and other

instructional equipment is typically the responsibility of the teacher.8 The children in our data display a sensitivity to

such features of educational practice. For instance, in the bookreading activity (excerpt 3), the management of the

book proved crucial to the organisation of the reading activity. The turning of the pages as well as the showing of the

images to the recipient of the reading, were clearly the actions of the principal reader—and the subject of elaborate

verbal as well as non-vocal negotiation. Similarly, Brintey’s methods of ‘doing teachership’ were closely dependent on

her handling of the paper figures in focus for the object labelling activity (excerpt 1), as well as Lisa’s instructions how

to pass the ball (excerpt 2). Hence, the management of educational artefacts was crucial to the children’s

accomplishment of these educational activities, as such artefacts provided for the partitioning of the tasks, rights and

responsibilities that comprised the institutional character of these activities.

Another organisational aspect of instructional activities in multilingual education has to do with language choice,

and we have seen in excerpts 1 and 2 how the children tailor their actions to align with the language that the teachers

would use in each type of activity in the preschools. Thus, we observed that despite their very rudimentary skills in

English, Britney and Michael would work to perform the object labelling activity in English (excerpt 1), and that the

girls engaged in the self-presentation routines (excerpt 2) would take measures to accomplish this in the language of

instruction in the Spanish group. Such orientation to language choice as a normative feature of the children’s conduct

during free play, further reveals their sensitivity to the organisational aspects of instructional activities in multilingual

educational practice. In contrast to the relatively clear-cut distribution of languages in the first two examples, we have

seen that the boys engaged in the reading of the Teletubby book (excerpt 3) did not establish a monolingual code for


8 Of course, such tasks may be delegated to the students, but this is typically done at the teacher’s request, and students’ spontaneous use of

classroom equipment is overwhelmingly sanctioned. Such instances further sustain the teachers’ control over certain educational artefacts in the

classroom.

their activity. Rather, we observed how they would occasionally use sequentially contrastive language choice to build

competitive (and to some degree oppositional) actions (cf. Cromdal, 2004), as well as how on other occasions, they

would align with each other’s language choice to create mutually cooperative episodes of interaction. Clearly,

compared to the first two excerpts, the boys in the bookreading example did not settle upon a stable division of tasks,

and we observed that their continuous negotiation of these tasks – the rights and responsibilities related to the physical

management of the book and the reading of its story – was strongly enmeshed with their performance of the activity,

resulting in a bilingual organisation of the bookreading event. In other words, rather than providing for a

straightforward enactment of the local identities involved in the reading activity, the availability of two languages

proved an interactional resource in the boys’ negotiation of these activities.

We set out our study by asking how young children engaged in multilingual preschool education find ways of

participating in instructional activities. By examining the ways in which the children produce such activities in the course

of their free play, we were able to learn about their own understanding of different formal educational activities, the

asymmetric relationships that such activities invoke and produce and the normative forms of participation they make

relevant—indeed, we are able to observe the children’s own ‘comprehension of [educational] culture and the logic of its

organisation and possibilities’ (Heap, 1985:265). Our data clearly suggest that children as young as 3 years of age are

already socialised to the institutional activities of preschool education. By way of conclusion, we are now able to propose

that this socialisation is not simply accomplished through teacher-led instructional activities. Rather, socialisation to

schooling forms part of the activities of the peer group itself. Hence, our analyses contribute to an understanding of the

relation between the social order of the peer group and the adult-governed order(s) of educational institutions—and we

anchor this understanding in the children’s own organisation of ordinary instructional activities taking place within the

realm of free play. Seneca’s notion that ‘we learn by teaching’ would seem no less true today than nearly 2000 years ago.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2007.05.013

Polly Bjork-Willen received her doctoral degree at the Department of Child Studies, Linkoping University, Sweden. Her research targets young

children’s everyday interaction taking place within plurilingual educational institutions. She is currently senior lecturer in the Department of Social

and Welfare Studies, Linkoping University at Norrkoping.

Jakob Cromdal is reader in child studies at the Department of Child Studies, Linkoping University, Sweden. His main body of work analyses social

interaction among children and youth in a range of mundane and institutional settings. It targets the ordinary features of practical reasoning and

social conduct of these members as a way of exploring social orders from within interactional events.


When education seeps into 'free play' : How preschool children accomplish multilingual education

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