Japanese two-year-olds’ spontaneous participation in storytelling activities as social interaction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.37312Keywords:
children’s storytelling, Japanese, participation framework, children’s interactionAbstract
The present study observes the very early stages of children’s storytelling activities in order to investigate how children younger than 3 years old participate in this socially complex activity at a time when both their linguistic and their interactional repertoires are still less than fully developed. Child language acquisition research has reported that children become skilful with narratives around 4 or 5 years of age, and suggests that younger children’s ability to talk about past experience is relatively underdeveloped before that time, when they are still generally poor at providing orientating information about who, when and where. Drawing upon a corpus of naturally occurring interactions in Japanese, my analysis of children’s spontaneous storytelling reveals that despite their limited linguistic resources, 2-year-old children’s participation in storytelling activities are skilfully organized into particular participation frameworks by using the various resources that are presently available to them. This paper thus argues that children’s competence in supplying specific information in their storytelling is not just a function of their developmental trajectory, but is also heavily influenced by the interactional environment that they find themselves in and motivated by the knowledge statuses of themselves and others. It shows conclusively, too, that some 2-year-old children are already quite capable in initiating or in participating in storytelling activity without the adult provision of a scaffolding for content.
References
Bateman, Amanda and Carr, Margaret (2017). Pursuing a telling: Managing a multi-unit turn in children’s storytelling In A. Bateman and A. Church (eds.).Children’s Knowledge in Interaction. Singapore: Springer.
Butler, Carley (2008). Talk and Social Interaction in the Playground. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Butler, Carley W., & Wilkinson, Ray (2103). Mobilising recipiency: Child participation and ‘rights to speak’ in multi-party family interaction. Journal of Pragmatics50, 37-51.
Eisenberg, Ann R. (1985). Learning to describe past experiences in conversation. Discourse Processes8, 177-204.
Filipi, Anna (2017). The emergence of storytelling. In A. Bateman and A. Church (eds.), Children’s Knowledge in Interaction. Springer. 279-295
Goodwin, Charles (1979).The interactive construction of a sentence in natural conversation. In G. Psathas (ed.),Everyday language: Studies in Ethnomethodology (pp. 97–121). New York, NY: Irvington Publishers.
Goodwin, Charles and Goodwin, Marjorie Harness (2004). Participation. In Alessandro Duranti (ed.), A companion to Linguistic Anthropology.(pp.222-244). Oxford: Blackwell.
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness (1990). Tactical uses of stories: Participation frameworks within girls’ and boys’ disputes, Discourse Processes13 (1), 33-71.
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness and Cekaite, Asta (2018). Embodied Family Choreography: Practices of Control, Care, and Mundane Creativity.London: Routledge.
Hutchby, Ian (2005). Children’s talk and social competence. Children and Society19 (1), 66-73.
Heritage, John (2012). The epistemic engine: sequence organization and territories of knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction45 (1), 30-52.
Jefferson, Gail (1978). Sequential aspects of story telling in conversation. In J. N. Schenkein (ed.), Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction(pp. 213-248). New York: Academic Press.
Kidwell, Mardi (2011). Epistemics and embodiment in the interactions of very young children. In T. Stivers, L. Mondada, and J. Steensig (eds). The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation(pp.257-282). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lerner, Gene, H., Zimmerman, Don. H., & Kidwell, Mardi (2011). Formal structure of practical tasks: A resource for action in the social lives of very young children. In C. Goodwin, C. Le Barton & J. Streek (eds.), Multimodality and Human activity: Research on Human Behavior, Action and Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mandelbaum, Jenny (2012). Storytelling in conversation. In J. Sidnell and T. Stivers (eds.), The Handbook of Conversation Analysis(pp. 492-508). Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.
Miller, Peggy & Sperry, Linda L. (1988). Early talk about the past: the origins of conversational stories of personal experience. Journal of Child Language13. 293-315.
Morita, Emi (2005).Negotiation of Contingent Talk: The Japanese Interactional Particles Ne and Sa. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Morita, Emi (2008).Highlighted moves within an action: Segmented talk in Japanese conversation. Discourse Studies10 (41), 513-537.
Morita, Emi (2012). Deriving the socio-pragmatic meanings of the Japanese interactional particle ne. Journal of Pragmatics44, 298--314.
Nelson, Katherine (1996).Language in Cognitive Development: The Emergence of the Mediated Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peterson, Carole (1990). The who, when and where of early narratives. Journal ofChild Language17. 433-455.
Sacks, Jacqueline (1983). Talking about the there and then; the emergence of displaced reference in parent-child discourse. In K.E. Nelson (ed.), Children’s Language, 4. New York: Gardner Press.
Schegloff, Emmanuel A. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversational Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Takada, Akira (2013). Generating morality in directive sequences: Distinctive strategies for developing communicative competence in Japanese caregiver-child interactions. Language & Communication33, 420-538.