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Early childhood educational centers (ECEC) are contexts where young children make their first contact with specific, culturally determined rules, practices, and values. Only a few studies have analyzed in-depth the practices through which the educators direct the children's action and attention while they are performing routine educational activities. By means of detailed transcription of educators-children conversations and Conversation Analytic methodology, this work examines a set of videorecorded interactions collected in one Italian ECE center ("nido"), particularly focusing on the verbal and multimodal resources employed by ECEC teachers as they manage episodes, where the children diverge from an expected course of action. Analyses reveal that the educators employ a variety of multimodal resources to orchestrate the child's attention and actions toward the desired course of activity, which open spaces where the child's agency, however more or less strongly reprimanded, is admitted and negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the indexical meaning of the pronoun ‘I’, in its marked use, in Italian work-meeting conversation. The hypothesis driving the study is that, in a context in which situated identities are manifold, marking the pronoun is a device to highlight the most official of one''s selves, thus changing the status of the utterance containing the marker. A typology of I-marked utterances is presented and the relative frequency of use is shown to vary with the organizational role of the participants. Detailed analysis of epistemic and performative I-marked utterances shows how role-identities are variously manipulated and mitigated through conversational devices such as self-repair, word delay, and metaphorical work. The discussion highlights how indexical meaning is a property of situated conversational practices and how marked pronouns can foreground selected identities in the cluster of selves that members of a work group can present to each other. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]