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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 (Rampton, 1995) 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. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Avhandlingens övergripande syfte är att studera barns sociala samspel med varandra och med vuxna i en flerspråkig förskolekontext. Mer specifikt studeras barnens språkanvändning i lek och i lärarledda aktiviteter, och hur barnen använder andra semiotiska resurser än språk för att åstadkomma deltagande i förskolans olika sammanhang. Studien belyser i också hur dessa kombineras och koordineras med tal. Avhandlingen består av ett mindre videomaterial från en australiensisk flerspråkig förskola och ett mer omfattande från en svensk flerspråkig förskola. Analytiskt och teoretiskt är avhandlingen influerad av ett etnometodologiskt perspektiv på socialt handlande, och konversationsanalys (CA) har tjänat som ett metodologiskt analysredskap. Det innebär att detaljerade transkriptioner och analyser av barnens sociala samspel har genomförts. Avhandlingens resultat presenteras i tre studier. Den första artikeln visar vilka samspelsresurser och pedagogiska rutiner som barn använder och gör synliga när de för in pedagogisk erfarenhet i sin lek. Den andra studien belyser framförallt olika interaktionella fenomen ('skuggning' och olika former av språkaiternering), som barnen använder och kombinerar med icke-verbala resurser för att få tillträde till eller upprätthålla lek. Den tredje studien poängterar rutiners betydelse för deltagande i lärarledda aktiviteter och synliggör att det sällan är språkliga missförstånd i sig, utan lärarnas avvikelser från förväntade rutiner i kända aktiviteter som kan försvåra barnens deltagande. Sammantaget visar studierna att barns språkbruk i flerspråkig förskolemiljö är en praktisk och situerad angelägenhet, där flerspråkigheten blir en av flera multimodala resurser som barn använder rör att delta i förskolans vardag. Detta studium av faktisk språkanvändning i förskolans praktiker synliggör de interaktionella rutiner som bidrar till barns socialisering och språklärande., The present thesis investigates children’s social interaction and participation in a multilingual preschool context. More specifically, it explores the children’s language use in combination and coordination with other semiotic resources in play and instructional activities, and also how these resources bring about participation in the daily activities of the preschool. The data corpus consists of video recordings from two preschools, a smaller corpus from an Australian preschool and a larger corpus from a Swedish preschool setting. The theoretical framework of the thesis is influenced by ethnomethodological perspective on social action, and conversation analysis (CA) has served as a tool for the analytical work, which includes detailed transcriptions and analyses. The findings are documented in three studies. The first study shows how children transform and explore interactional resources and educational routines when they enact previously experienced second language activities within ‘free play’. The second study explores interactional phenomena like ‘shadowing’ and different forms of language choice; resources that children use in combination with non-vocal moves to gain and sustain participation in peer play. The third study identifies and discusses interactional trouble in educational activities in terms of the teachers’ elaboration of some routine features of these activities, resulting in a mismatch between the teachers’ local aims and the children’s projections of relevant next actions. As a whole, children’s social interaction is treated in terms of practical and local concern, where language is one of several semiotic resources for children’s participation in everyday preschool activities. Accordingly, studies of children’s language use demonstrate interactional routines that organise children’s socialisation and language learning.

In many western countries, pre-school are the first place where immigrant children really get in touch with the majority language (in this case Swedish) and therefore a place where they begin to develop a bilingual or multilingual identity. This presentation will focus on immigrant children-s interaction in play and other informal events. However rather than viewing the individual children as, in the first place, second language learners, I will focus on the use and construction of socially distributed knowledge in a bilingual preschool setting. How do we understand the learning process in a bilingual environment, and how do bilingual children use their language resources in social interaction? The bilingual children in the present study are aged three to five, with Swedish as their second or third language. In-depth analyses of situated -classroom- interaction explicate participants- methods for accomplishing pedagogic activities, that is, their ways of exploiting and reflexively producing contexts for learning. The results are discussed from a discourse psychological perspective on learning, highlighting the collaborative aspects of children-s learning and social development. On this view, children are seen as competent constructers of the social and cultural order. It is finally argued that language has a central role in educational studies because analysis of language use is the analysis of the active production of social organisation.