The interaction between young toddlers: constructing and organisingparticipation frameworks

The study aims at analyzing toddlers' sociability within an early educational context, by adopting a socio‐constructivist perspective that considers ‘school‐nursery’ (Italian ‘nido di infanzia’) as an important natural context that can promote their sociability development. The larger research involved 18 toddlers of 20–40 months of age, who attended an Italian nursery, and their four caretakers. The study used an ethnographical methodological approach: it has been field research within a real life situation and has been based on semi‐participant observation with different observational instruments. Observational data have been analyzed at three different levels, based on the main principles of activity theory, conversation analysis and discourse analysis. This paper focuses specifically on the construct of a participation framework: the analysis showed that toddlers are able to co‐construct complex structures, based on different interactional levels and diverse communicative registers (e.g., linguistic–v...