Imitation in children’s locomotor play

Authors

  • Elliott M. Hoey University of Basel
  • David DeLiema University of California, Berkeley
  • Rachel S. Y. Chen University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State University
  • Virginia J. Flood University of California, Berkeley

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.36016

Keywords:

children play, multimodality, imitation

Abstract

Children commonly engage in social locomotor play—the horsing around, running about, and physical contact characteristic of playgrounds and neighborhood streets. To adults and outsiders, this activity may look like undisciplined chaos. However, the very recognizabilitly of locomotor play—the fact that children observably pull it off together as a discriminate activity—points to a set of shared practices for its accomplishment. In this article, we investigate children’s methods and resources for organizing social locomotor play. Using video recordings of 5-6yo children playing during an immersive technologically-mediated science lesson, our analysis shows in fine detail some of the orderliness of social locomotor play. In particular, we demonstrate how children use imitation to organize the initiation and progression of this activity.

Author Biographies

  • Elliott M. Hoey, University of Basel

    Elliott Hoey is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Basel investigating autonomous and joint action in construction site activities. He received his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, where he examined participants’ behavior during lapses in talk. Other recent work has concerned rejections in institutional settings and the placement of drinking in conversation.

  • David DeLiema, University of California, Berkeley

    David DeLiema is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley working on play-based embodied learning and collaborative storytelling about failure, specifically in the context of debugging computer code. He received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he investigated viewpoint and spatial reasoning in gesture, epistemic cognition, and failure stories in mathematics.

  • Rachel S. Y. Chen, University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State University

    Rachel Chen is a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State University investigating the multimodal interactions of minimally-verbal/nonverbal individuals on the autism spectrum within families and other institutions.

  • Virginia J. Flood, University of California, Berkeley

    Virginia J. Flood is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. She uses video to investigate the fine details of embodied interaction in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning contexts. Her recent projects include investigating the multimodal nature of revoicing interactions and initiation-response-evaluation sequences in STEM instruction.

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Published

2018-08-03

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Hoey, E. M., DeLiema, D., Chen, R. S. Y., & Flood, V. J. (2018). Imitation in children’s locomotor play. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 2(1), 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.36016

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