Tattling and Dispute Resolution: Moral Order, Emotions and Embodiment in the Teacher-Mediated Disputes of Young Second Language Learners

Abstract

Purpose – Within the growing field of interactional research on children's interactions, the present study explores how social and moral order are established through embodied practices in a multilingual kindergarten classroom. It explores the interactions of immigrant children (with very limited knowledge of Swedish as a second language) and the systematic formats of teachers’ questions employed during children's disputes and tattling (children's reports of peer group conflicts and accusations of untoward behaviour).

Methodology – The study is based on a video-ethnography (50 hours of recordings) in a multilingual kindergarten class for 6-year-olds in Sweden. The analytical approach combines Conversation Analysis (CA) with analysis of multimodally mobilized actions.

Findings – The analyses highlight how interactional meaning-making in conflict situations is accomplished with very limited linguistic resources. Children's tattle telling cornered teachers into the position of being a neutral authoritative agent who acted on their responsibility to resolve the conflict. Teachers reorganized tattle telling into a multiparty interrogation. Different interrogative formats were employed to establish a ‘factually correct’ description of the event. Teachers used open questions (‘what happened?’), ‘why’ and ‘yes/no’ interrogative formats. ‘Why’ questions were lexically designed to implicitly confirm the culpability of the accused child. ‘Yes/no’ questions invited the child's ratification of the teacher's version of the event.

Research implications – It is argued that research on children's social order will gain from understanding that conflict resolution in educational settings is a multilayered social practice that both presents a locus where the institutional order is (re)established and a locus where children's peer group concerns are played out.

Citation

Cekaite, A. (2012), "Tattling and Dispute Resolution: Moral Order, Emotions and Embodiment in the Teacher-Mediated Disputes of Young Second Language Learners", Danby, S. and Theobald, M. (Ed.) Disputes in Everyday Life: Social and Moral Orders of Children and Young People (Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Vol. 15), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 165-191. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1537-4661(2012)0000015011