Peer group interactions in multilingual educational settings: Co-constructing social order and norms for language use

Abstract

The present study explores peer group interactions in early multilingual educational settings, specifically focusing on children’s language-related episodes. Highlighting the multifaceted work of these interactional practices, it demonstrates in detail how children’s corrective actions, targeting, assessing and criticizing of the other’s language use were utilized in building the peer group identities and relations, while simultaneously indexing local norms for conduct and language use. Designed as outright disagreements with the prior speaker, corrections highlighted the contrast between the recipient’s error and the speaker’s remedy and entailed (a) the disagreement with the prior speaker (e.g. linguistic polarity marker ‘no’), (b) the explicit identification of the trouble source (‘this is not x’) and (c) the instruction as to the correct replacement (‘this is x’). Similarly, word searches in the peer group were resolved so as to index the asymmetry in knowledge between the peers. In the production of corrections, the children displayed and recognized the relevance of appropriate use of the lingua franca (e.g. Swedish) as part of their situated production of local social order. Language expertise was an issue for negotiations and redefinitions in multilingual peer group’s interactions and was one of the factors organizing social relations in multilingual educational settings.