This article explores the socio-discursive competence of young children in Galician pre-schools. In particular, it deals with the way in which children – aged from 2;10 to 4;05 years – combine embodied actions and verbal resources to co-narrate stories with peers and adults. Using an audiovisual corpus of naturally occurring interactions, we have conducted a qualitative and multimodal analysis, observing how children react to diverse footings and negotiate participation frameworks in multiparty interactions. The findings suggest three progressive stages in the (...) development of socio-discursive competence in which children use different strategies: the stage of interactive proto-narrations, the stage of collaborative narrations and the stage of polyphonic monologue narrations. Our detailed examination reveals a progressive increase in the diversity of the participation frameworks represented by children, as well as in the complexity of the multimodal resources they use, and a rise in children’s grammatical repertoire linked to an improvement in children’s pragmatic skills. (shrink)

Focusing on one of the most studied dimensions of Social Psychology, i.e., intergroup relations, this study analyzes its discursive accomplishment in a specific group-based intervention, i.e., the talk and work of an Italian group home, i.e., a small alternative care facility hosting a group of out-of-home children. Particularly, we focused on the fictionally called “Nuns’ Home,” a group home previously investigated for its ethnocentric bias, and its intergroup relations with “inside” and “outside” groups, such as schools, biological families, and social (...) services. By combining a qualitative and quantitative approach in analyzing one audio-recorded ethnographic interview with the whole team of professionals, we aimed at accounting for the multitude of internal and external stakeholders that participants refer to, analyzing the discursive accomplishment of ingroup and outgroup in talk-in-interaction and investigating ingroup bias and group qualification. To do so, we detected social categorization markers and qualifying devices that participants rely on when referring to groups. Results show that, among the numerous groups recognized, participants co-construct intergroup relations and ingroup bias implying negative assessment over external groups. Being different from traditional laboratory studies illustrating substantial contraposition between ingroup and outgroup, our qualitative analysis reveals the multitude of groups by which the ingroup is formed and their internal fragmentation. To conclude, we discussed the implications of qualitatively studying intergroup relations in group homes and indicated future lines of research. (shrink)

Resumen La categoría de participación permite observar empíricamente cómo las interacciones sitúan a las personas de maneras específicas en el marco de prácticas sociales concretas. El objetivo de este trabajo es caracterizar el modo en que se organiza la participación en las reuniones de un equipo interdisciplinario de salud en un hospital de Buenos Aires, Argentina. Para ello, analizamos las interacciones orales atendiendo a la manera en que se gestionan los turnos de habla y se interpretan las instancias de habla (...) simultánea en el contexto de dos actividades vinculadas con la toma de decisiones y la resolución de obstáculos en la interacción: una propuesta de escritura y una secuencia de reparación. A través del análisis, definimos la participación conjunta como una forma de participación en la que se prioriza la construcción colectiva por sobre las voces individuales y en la que el habla simultánea tiene naturaleza cooperativa, no disruptiva. Asimismo, identificamos los efectos que produce en las reuniones, orientados a la construcción del consenso, el establecimiento de la continuidad temática y el mantenimiento de las relaciones interpersonales. A la luz de estos resultados, observamos que la participación conjunta tiene un rol central en el proceso de construcción y mantenimiento de una identidad grupal, reforzando la inscripción de los profesionales en ella. (shrink)