"Let's Build a Tower!" Interactive Practices Among a Friendship Group of Preschool Boys

• In Event: 64.086 - MTCC Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: 64.086-10 - Play as a Discursive Resource for Examining Membership, Power, and Friendship

Abstract

In this paper, we examine how a peer group of preschool boys identified in a larger ethnographic study of peer group interactions go about “building their social and moral universe” (Goodwin 2006, p. vii). Working within a conversation analysis framework, this study looks at resources with which participants build their understandings of the interaction and organize the peer group. We study in more detail the directives and directive-response sequence, affect displays, and embodied moves the boys use in everyday play interactions. Spontaneous peer play interactions among this peer group of boys were videotaped across the school year and analyzed. Talk examples illustrate the interactional resources that children, including boys, can use to establish particular forms of social organization.

Authors

• Jacquie Kemp, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Amelia Kyratzis, University of California - Santa Barbara