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The paper focuses on arguing and reasoning processes occurring at dinnertime family conversations. Our goal is to highlight the interplay between two sides of argumentative practices: the justification as social need to provide evidences for an assertion; the dialogic function of argumentation that refers to the goals arguers want to achieve during discussions. Through the analysis of a case study we discuss a sequence in which a child resists his father’s directive by an elaborated argumentative strategy in order to achieve his goal. Results show how participants engage in opposing the other’s standpoint and are socialized to argumentative dialogues.

Drawing on a corpus of ethnographic data collected among 8 Italian middle-class families, this article analyzes transitions in and out of episodes of games played by parents and children at home. The analyses focus on game prefaces in which participants display their mutual availability to engage in the game, and game codas in which participants signal their disengagement. The article shows how game prefaces and game codas allow parents, in particular, to accomplish concurrent operations (such as, attending to housekeeping activities) while orienting to the game. Transitional sequences, then, help sustain the management of the parallel temporalities ordinarily running across family life.

This work studies verbal conflict between parents and preadolescents through analysis of family dinnertime conversations. We move from the assumption that verbal conflict is an educational instrument of interaction and a tool of socialization. The aim of the research is to analyze the participants' strategies in situations of conflict and to highlight the relations between parents and preadolescents in these specific situations. The data collection methodology is mainly ethnographical: videotape recordings of Italian middle class family dinners (the families were selected as being dual career ones with two children) were fully transcribed and codified following the approach of Conversation Analysis. The results of the quantitative (by the use of the log-linear models) and qualitative analyses confirm the importance of verbal conflict in family context as a particular cultural strategy of relationships between parents and preadolescents. The analytical data underline the relations between different aspects of conflict and the pragmatic implications for all family members at dinnertime conversations.

Drawing on autobiographical recollections, I propose to see collaborative research as a learning experience. I assume a sociocultural psychological approach to the social understanding and interpretation of different scientific research practices. I examine the modalities of collaboration in my first experience of managing an important national research project on Italian families' dinner table conversations, and in a larger collaborative research endeavor concerning the everyday life of middle-class Italian, Swedish and US families from a comparative view (the Sloan project). On the basis of these experiences, I highlight some of the difficulties met by two other projects presented in this special issue, the DUNES project (Tartas and Muller Mirza, this issue) and the Transition project (Markova and Plichtova, this issue). I conclude by suggesting a provisional criterion for generativity in collaborative research. I suggest that generativity occurs when the more expert and academically oldest ones become conscious that they are learning something new from the group and from some other, independently from age and experience.

This article concerns the dynamics of domestic space `appropriation' in Italian middle-class working families. The article starts from a background in multidisciplinary literature, mostly in the area of ethnographical and psychological studies, where the concepts of both `ownership' and `territoriality' prove to be inadequate. A dynamic view of space appropriations is chosen instead: starting from `outside appropriations', the presence of marked thresholds is then considered. Secondly, domestic space appropriations within the house are analysed in a purely qualitative way. There are selective and `predominant' appropriations by a single family member and by the whole household; questions of sovereignty and painful `proscriptions' (kingdoms and exiles) arise when specific parts of the house pertain to a given individual. But there are also unstable appropriations which reveal that there are negotiations in progress according to the family's power dynamics. Thus defined, the categories of domestic space also provide a key to understanding the families' relationships.

Starting from a view of socialization as a bidirectional process, the paper contributes to the field of language socialization in detailing how conversational interaction provides tools for parents and children to collaboratively construe a sense of moral meaning and social order. The paper illustrates both the agentive participation of Italian children in dialogue on normative behavior and ways that their discursive contributions shape the structure and thematic content of parental talk that ensues. Parental responses to children’s normative transgressions socialize them also into the language of transgression. The children we studied supply and elicit accounts from others that attempt to justify or explain transgression.

The paper addresses the issue of cultural descriptions as they are perceived and used within mundane conversation. We analyze a discussion of an Italian family about a future formal occasion (a party) in a foreign country (Austria), with foreign participants, in which they shall produce a typically Italian meal. The analysis shows how cultural descriptions are both a resource and a constraint when they must orient a practical activity which must be publicly acknowledged for its cultural typicality. Discrepancies are highlighted between cultural descriptions and ordinary practices, but it is also shown how culture (or ‘cultural preferences’) gets produced, at a less explicit level, within discursive practices, through turn-taking filtering, sequential architecture and selection of differentiated addressees. The socializing import of the discursive situation for the younger participants is also discussed, with reference to the relevant conversational devices.

Small groups of 4th-grade school children worked autonomously on the analysis of a photograph, guided by a set of questions ranging from particular issues to more general ones. Transcripts of the recordings show that children's talk deals with key issues of historical methodology: reliability of the source, manipulations transforming findings into a "source," generalizability from single cases, and interpretation and comparison with present times. In addressing the latter point, children are also drawn to a prospective view of the present time, social organization, scientific progress, and the like. The depth of the discussion was the result of the nature of the stimulus material, the group situation, and the structured format of the task.

The way of speaking at school can transmit ways of thinking and knowing and give structure to experience and knowledge. This study aims to describe and interpret the kind of discursive practices which can be constructed in a «literacy event», in this case a particular type of classroom discussion about a story. The study integrantes a Vygotskian perspective with the conversational approach proposed by Levinson. Following this approach, particular sequential moves in dispute and co-construction episodes are identified. This analysis was complemented by framing the task and the resulting data within the general background of Leont'ev theory of activity, and its recent applications to adult-child joint activity. The different components of this social event in early literacy, were interpreted according to tisis approach. The study hows the teacher and children can accomodate to each other and reciprocally appropiate different perspectives in a literacy event.

The contributions of this book lead the way to a wide variety of questions related to young people moving toward adulthood in complex societies. Ideas such as youth, society, and adulthood are problematic; so is the nature of the move itself. In their opening chapters, Perret-Clermont and Resnick consider this period as a time of preparation or transition; but it can also be described in terms of socialization, of learning – and learning refers both to acquisition of skills in specific communities and to the ability to enter new social spaces – or of developing thinking abilities – for resolving problems or for reflecting on one's own trajectory. The authors included in this volume would all admit that young people neither learn nor think in isolation, and the authors would also assume the embeddedness of personal, intersubjective, group, and wider contextual dimensions, although their analyses focus on different levels. In this dense landscape, the reader is invited to follow a spiral path, moving along these dimensions through different zones of social worlds. This path should provide some relief and some depth to this landscape. The book is organized in six parts. Parts II and III focus on communities of practice. Part II plunges us into gray zones of the social world. The study of these less known, more spontaneous spaces makes it possible to highlight tensions and challenges that young people face in transition periods in modern societies.

The present article focuses on the distribution of participation in family interaction involving young children (3-5 years old). Adopting a purely qualitative method of analysis, we show instances of family dinnertime conversations in which children appeared banned from participation, while they are the topic of the ongoing talk. We have called " backstage interaction, " sequences adjacent to those in which the child is involved, and within her/his auditory range, so that the child projected participation role alternates between that of addressee and overhearer. We argue that the "backstage talk" in the child's presence has the main effect of casting the current interaction with the child as a representation, in Goffman's terms (1959). Though, the child is left the opportunity to enter again the conversation: the person involved is interested in layering the selfs/he exposed, offering the child a "fictional self to interact with, thus preserving their face from the incumbent threat of the child's impoliteness or embarrassing "spontaneity".

The aim of the study is to identify both modes of children’s participation in family disputes and types of argumentative moves adopted, particularly in the act of opposing (problematizing) others or defending oneself. The corpus consists of twenty-seven dinner conversations of ten middle-class families living in Rome and Naples, each with one child between three and six years and at least one older sibling.

In this paper we aim at analyzing the modes of differentiation in children’s writing development during the presyllabic phase that, in the theoretical framework developed by Ferreiro and Teberosky, comes before the discovery of sound correspondance. Seventeen Italian children were interviewed seven times during the implementation of research on «Educational Continuity» between «scuola materna» and primary school. We first examine how minimum quantity and internal variation rules appear in Italian children as organizing principles for controlling quantity and quality of writing, and as necessary conditions for the differentiation process. Starting from this, it is possible to find two differentiation modes in writing; aformal one, and a mode in which some type ofexternal referent is used (meaning or object features). For most children the two modes are alternatives, and passing from one to another is a possible but not necessary step. The external group (which is older) has significantly less quantity repertoire than the formal one: this can explain why looking for an external point of reference can be an outcome of the child’s formal research for differentiating writings.

Research on children's social cognition has dealt mainly with face to face relations; only a few studies have considered how children understand impersonal aspects of society such as economics. This study involves an investigation of teaching the concepts of work and profit to third-graders. Five instruction units were created and during a one-month period these were presented to five classes at different schools in Rome. A sample of 80 pupils was interviewed before and after teaching aimed at ascertaining their ideas on prices, profit and product distribution. Children's responses were scored on several scales, on which separate ANOVAs (class x sex x repeated measures or class x repeated measures) were carried out. The results show an overall improvement in children's knowledge, with differences that may be related not only to the complexity of the different concept but also to children's initial levels of competence.

This paper presents the results of a curriculum of basic economic concepts given to 5 fourth-grade classes (Ss=95). The main topic of this curriculum was the production and distribution of agricultural produce, which had already proved to be difficult for the children. The proposed curriculum was largely inspired by the idea that familiarity with «social scenes» related to the economic process in question is necessary (although not sufficient) to allow children to understand such concepts. Children's level of understanding was tested before and after the curriculum by means of a semi-structured interview on 3 main topics: farmers' use of produce; farmers' use of earnings; produce distribution. Answers were scored according to their complexity and correctness; variance analyses performed on the scores showed significant improvements, as well as differences between classes. A qualitative analysis of children's answers was also performed, with the aim of interpreting the nature of change in each topic.