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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.

Disputes in everyday life – Social and moral orders of children and young people has papers written by researchers whose interests lie in studying children's everyday interactions, with a balance of papers from emerging and well-established researchers in this field. The volume draws on scholarship from Australia, England, New Zealand, Sweden, Turkey, United States of America (USA), and Wales, investigating everyday practices of children's disputes in Australia, England, Italy, Sweden, USA, and Wales. The papers themselves speak to the theme of the volume, so we only briefly summarize their contents.

Karin Aronsson is a professor at the Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, and before that at Linköping University (1988–2008). Her work focuses on how talk is used to build social organization, with a particular focus on children's peer groups, institutional encounters, and identity-in-interaction. Other research interests include children's play, informal learning, and bilingual conversations. She publishes internationally, and her most recent papers appeared in Language in Society and Discourse & Society. A recent book is: Hedegaard, M., Aronsson, K., Højholt, C., & Skjær Ulvik, O. (Eds.). Children, childhood and everyday life: Children's perspectives. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.