Morality-in-interaction: Toddlers’ recyclings of institutional discourses of feeling during peer disputes in daycare
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Amy Kyratzis
Amy Kyratzis is Professor of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She uses ethnography and talk-in-interaction to understand children’s peer interactions and language socialization of one another. Her current research examines how bilingual preschool children of Mexican heritage in California use multimodal resources and code-switching to negotiate interactional footings and linguistic identities. Her articles have appeared in
First Language, Research on Language and Social Interaction ,Discourse Processes ,Journal of Pragmatics , and other journals.
and
Bahar Köymen
Bahar Köymen is a lecturer in Developmental Psychology at the University of Manchester. Her research interests include development of communication and social cognition. Her current research investigates the emergence and development of human reasoning. Her articles have appeared in
Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology and other journals.
Abstract
Everyday discursive practices comprising “emotion talk” constitute a site where morality is socialized. Yet few studies have examined how emotional expressions are assembled and serve as integral parts of the unfolding action in multi-party, remedial interchanges involving caregivers and children in early care settings. This paper examines a particular type of emotion talk, complement constructions with verbs of feeling (“want”) and saying (e.g., “Are you saying ‘no don’t stand on me’?) primed by caregivers as part of a curriculum encouraging children to use their words to express their feelings so children become sensitized to one another’s hurt feeling during peer disputes. The data were drawn from a larger corpus of video recordings of children’s naturalistic interaction collected over two years in two toddler-infant daycare centers with children aged 12–30 months. A talk-in-interaction approach was adopted. The syntactic formats provided to children by caregivers, and how children and caregivers recycled and laminated utterances with different kinds of modalities over turns, uncovered usually unarticulated normative socio-cultural assumptions regarding the shaping of affect at the daycare. The results illustrate how affective work in remedial interchanges provides a resource for participants to articulate moral values and underscore children’s agency.
About the authors
Amy Kyratzis is Professor of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She uses ethnography and talk-in-interaction to understand children’s peer interactions and language socialization of one another. Her current research examines how bilingual preschool children of Mexican heritage in California use multimodal resources and code-switching to negotiate interactional footings and linguistic identities. Her articles have appeared in First Language, Research on Language and Social Interaction, Discourse Processes, Journal of Pragmatics, and other journals.
Bahar Köymen is a lecturer in Developmental Psychology at the University of Manchester. Her research interests include development of communication and social cognition. Her current research investigates the emergence and development of human reasoning. Her articles have appeared in Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology and other journals.
| [ | Left square bracket | The beginning of overlapping talk |
| ] | Right square bracket | The end of overlapping talk |
| . | Period | Falling intonation |
| ? | Question mark | Rising intonation |
| , | Comma | Continuing intonation |
| - | Dash | Abrupt cut-off |
| = | Equal sign | Talk produced without transition-space |
| : | Column | Prolonged sound. |
| warm | Underlining | Prominent syllable |
| YOU’LL | All caps | Loud speech |
| ° | Degree sign | Quiet speech |
| (X) | X’s in parentheses | Undecipherable speech, X=1 syllable |
| (warm) | Words in parentheses | Uncertain transcription |
| {[ac]} | “ac” in brackets | Accelerated speech |
| (0.5) | Number in parentheses | Pause of designated no. seconds |
| ↑ | Upwards arrow | Heightened pitch |
| ((smiling)) | Double parentheses | Transcriber’s comments |
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The moral character of emotion work in adult-child interactions
- The face of noncompliance in family interaction
- Co-constructing a child as disorderly: Moral character work in narrative accounts of upsetting experiences
- Morality-in-interaction: Toddlers’ recyclings of institutional discourses of feeling during peer disputes in daycare
- Young children’s affective stance through embodied displays of emotion during tellings
- Subversive compliance and embodiment in remedial interchanges
- Epilogue
- Micro dramas and morality-in-interaction: A commentary
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The moral character of emotion work in adult-child interactions
- The face of noncompliance in family interaction
- Co-constructing a child as disorderly: Moral character work in narrative accounts of upsetting experiences
- Morality-in-interaction: Toddlers’ recyclings of institutional discourses of feeling during peer disputes in daycare
- Young children’s affective stance through embodied displays of emotion during tellings
- Subversive compliance and embodiment in remedial interchanges
- Epilogue
- Micro dramas and morality-in-interaction: A commentary
