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Purpose: The overall aim of the chapter is to explore how preschoolers with different language backgrounds accomplish everyday interaction at a Swedish preschool, where the lingua franca (common language) is Swedish. More specifically, it aims to analyze how the target children, despite their limited language resources in Swedish, use their existing communicative resources to make friends and achieve intersubjectivity in front of two alphabet charts illustrating the Arabic and Latin alphabets, respectively. Methodology/approach: The data are drawn from a single play episode between three boys and a girl, aged four years. Their interaction was video-recorded, and the analytical framework of the study is influenced by ethnomethodological work on social action focusing particularly on participants' methodical ways of accomplishing and making sense of social activities. Findings: The analyses show that the children's trajectory of achieving intersubjectivity was partly bothersome as their interpretation of the alphabet charts diverged, due to their different language knowledge and earlier experiences. Hence, to attain joint understanding and intersubjectivity, they used a range of communicative resources: besides speaking Swedish they used word mixing, attention-getters ("look" and "check it out"), and nonverbal moves such as pointing, gesturing, intone, and screaming. It is notable that, despite some problems in understanding, their desire to make friends and have fun together seemed to compensate for their joint failure to always understand each other. Practical implications: Detailed analyses and observations of how children with diverse language backgrounds use their communicative resources to achieve intersubjectivity and make friends can be useful for preschool teachers' understanding of how they can further support the children's socialization and capturing of the majority language - here Swedish. Originality/value: The present chapter contributes to a wider understanding of how second-language learning is a complex trajectory edged with both setbacks and successes, especially when all the children interacting have diverse language backgrounds and experiences. However, the analysis highlights how, in their endeavor to make friends, the children find ways to solve problems in situ in their own way, and enjoy each other's company despite the fragility of the play and their language shortcomings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study explores peer group interactions in early multilingual educational settings, specifically focusing on children’s language-related episodes. Highlighting the multifaceted work of these interactional practices, it demonstrates in detail how children’s corrective actions, targeting, assessing and criticizing of the other’s language use were utilized in building the peer group identities and relations, while simultaneously indexing local norms for conduct and language use. Designed as outright disagreements with the prior speaker, corrections highlighted the contrast between the recipient’s error and the speaker’s remedy and entailed (a) the disagreement with the prior speaker (e.g. linguistic polarity marker ‘no’), (b) the explicit identification of the trouble source (‘this is not x’) and (c) the instruction as to the correct replacement (‘this is x’). Similarly, word searches in the peer group were resolved so as to index the asymmetry in knowledge between the peers. In the production of corrections, the children displayed and recognized the relevance of appropriate use of the lingua franca (e.g. Swedish) as part of their situated production of local social order. Language expertise was an issue for negotiations and redefinitions in multilingual peer group’s interactions and was one of the factors organizing social relations in multilingual educational settings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The present paper explores how children participate in peer play activities in a multilingual preschool setting. Participation is understood as a practical achievement in social interaction. Through in-depth analyses of video recordings of peer play, the study demonstrates how the children artfully exploit a range of multimodal resources in play activities. Of special interest are: the children''s coordination of nonvocal actions with talk; and: how such complex action types are produced to accomplish and sustain participation in multi-party play. The analyses highlight two interactional phenomena of interest for our understanding of the children''s conduct, namely ‘shadowing’ and ‘crossing’. Shadowing refers to the carefully tailored delivery of an action, which repeats an immediately preceding move of another participant. Crossing () relates to a specific instance of language alternation, through which participants align with and make use of their interlocutors’ linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. It is shown how these different types of verbal as well as nonvocal resources are intertwined, sequentially organized and collaboratively deployed in children''s construction of locally accountable actions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]