Search results

This chapter investigates children’s play and social interactions in a multilingual preschool context where the lingua franca (common language) is English. This investigation follows the experiences of one child for whom English is a second language (L2). The analytic focus explores how the child gains access and participation in play activities in relation to the peer culture of the group.

Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis approaches, this chapter offers turn-by-turn analysis to show how the children’s interactions unfold and identifies children’s interactional approaches as they enter play and make friends. Particular attention is focused on how one of the children manages his attempts at entry into the peer group’s games using the building blocks.

The close detailed analysis of one extended episode highlighted the co-produced nature of interaction. The findings identify a repertoire of four resources used by one of the L2 children within the peer group, to access play activities in the building space: (1) linguistic resources of requests, such as “Can I play?” “Are you building?”; (2) “tailing” others closely; (3) references to the moral obligations of being a best friend; and (4) using objects as resources for entry. While the analytic focus is on one child’s strategies, analysis considers this child’s individual actions in relation to his peers. What is made apparent is that children’s uptake and participation in peer interaction is dependent on the social agenda and the local aspects of peer culture, not solely on children's language proficiency.

Attention to how children employ strategies to play and understanding the local conditions of peer culture can assist educators to support children’s attempts for participation and friendship in multilingual early years settings.

The purpose of this study is to explore how service employee choice and use of language to initiate and maintain conversation with second generation immigrant customers (SGIC) influence customer evaluation of the service encounter, and whether such employee acts may lead customers to employee switching, branch switching (i.e. switching from one to another location within the same brand) and/or brand switching (switching to another brand altogether).

A scenario-based between-subjects experiment of 4 (employee: match, adapt, bilingual, no adapt) × 2 (fast food, post office) × 2 (English, Spanish) was used to examine the SGIC response to service encounters in different contexts arising from employee choice and use of language. These scenarios were complemented with a series of measurement scales. The instruments, which were identical except in scenario sections, were administered on 788 second-generation Mexican American customers, resulting in 271 (fast food) and 265 (post office) effective responses.

In both service contexts, when employees initiated conversation that matched (English or Spanish) the customer expectations, the SGIC perceptions of interaction quality was higher as compared to other scenarios, leading to subsequent satisfaction and lower switching intentions (employee and branch). Similarly, interaction quality was higher for adapt scenarios as compared to bilingual or no adapt scenarios. Bilingual customers perceived higher interaction quality in bilingual/no-adapt scenarios when compared to monolingual customers. In both contexts, service quality and satisfaction were associated with employee switching and branch switching, but not with brand switching.

By utilizing interaction adaptation theory to conceptualize the effects of employee choice and use of language, the study grounds the model and the hypotheses in theoretical bases and provides empirical corroboration of the theory. The study also contributes toward understanding the service encounters from the perspective of an overlooked group of vulnerable customers: second-generation immigrants.

Service research cautions service providers that a key factor in attracting and retaining customers is having detailed communication guidelines and empowering employees to follow those guidelines. The findings go a step further and underscore the critical role of communication from a managerial standpoint. It is in the interest of service organizations to develop guidelines that will govern employee choice and use of language during service encounters. So doing is commercially justified because unguided employee choice and use of language can result in customer switching and attrition.

The juxtaposition between assigned versus asserted identities is an important one not only in social sciences but also within service research. As service encounters grow increasingly multicultural, the need to educate employees on multiculturally appropriate communication etiquette rises in importance. The findings should encourage service firms and local governments to develop formal communication guidelines that begin with multiculturalism as a central tenet permeating all aspects of employee–employee, employee–customer and customer–customer communications. Service providers ought to take precautionary measures to ensure customers will be empowered to assert their identities in their own terms, if they wish so.

The study demonstrates how employee choice and use of language during service encounters may thwart SGIC, who might view such employee behaviors as acts of identity assignment and, consequently, feel stigmatized, marginalized and offended; and links such customer experiences to switching behavior through mediatory mechanisms.

To examine – through video – the literate life as a school administrator through the use of multimodal interaction analysis (Norris, 2004) and dramaturgical metaphors (Goffman, 1959) in order to address how school administrators use language – both verbal and nonverbal language – to negotiate the roles they play with various audiences in daily interactions.

While studies on communication in school administration focus on its practical, relational, and logistic aspects, they tend to neglect the truly complex nature of literacy, communication, and social interaction. Through the use of video, Multimodal Interaction Analysis (MMI), and dramaturgy, it is possible to capture and analyze language use in its totality – to explore how it truly works on the stage of school: a constant, overlapping marriage of nonverbal and verbal communicative modes that cannot be divorced and should not be examined separately. This chapter provides a progressive approach to help school administrators understand how their verbal and nonverbal language affects the interactions they have with various audiences every day.

The autoethnographic study revealed the intersection of language and leadership in the life of a school administrator. It also showed how video, multimodal interaction analysis, and dramaturgical metaphors can help educational leaders understand their own literate lives through new lenses and how they can grow from that understanding.

Continued studies using video, multimodal interaction analysis, and dramaturgical metaphors can further illuminate the complex language practices of school leaders and provide unique lenses to examine other school-based and non-school-based social interactions, so we can better understand the myriad roles we play and the language we use to negotiate those roles.

While bilinguals frequently mix languages in everyday conversation, these hybrid language practices have often been viewed from a deficit perspective, particularly in classroom contexts. However, an emerging literature documents the complexity of hybrid language practices and their usefulness as an academic and social resource for bilingual students. This chapter examines hybrid language practices among English- and Spanish-speaking high school students in an astronomy/oceanography classroom in southern Arizona. Microethnography, or fine-grained analysis of video recordings from long-term ethnographic observation, is used to reveal what bilingual students accomplished with hybrid language practices in the classroom and to outline implications for teachers who want to engage their students’ hybrid repertoires. Specifically, the analyses reveal that careful attention to hybrid language practices can provide teachers with insights into students’ academic learning across linguistic codes, their use of language mixing for particular functions, and their beliefs about language and identity. The research is necessarily limited in scope because such in-depth analysis can only be done with a very small amount of data. Nevertheless, the findings affirm that hybrid language practices can enrich classroom discourse, academic learning, and social interaction for emergent bilinguals. The chapter highlights a teacher’s story in order to offer practical guidance to other teachers who seek to capitalize on the promise of hybrid language practices in their own classrooms.

Purpose – Disputes provide a way for children to negotiate how they stand in relationship to one another in the local peer group interaction (Goodwin, 1990, 2006). This study follows the everyday peer disputes and classroom negotiations of a peer group of 8-year-old to 12-year-old Turkish–English speaking (and Meskhetian Turkish–English–Russian speaking) children attending a Turkish Saturday School in the United States, where a monolingual Turkish norm is projected by the teachers, to see how these institutional language norms are used as a resource for the peers to conduct their everyday interactions.

Methodology/approach – This study combines methods of ethnography (data are drawn from a year-long ethnography which followed children's everyday language practices in two school settings) and talk-in-interaction, specifically Membership Categorization Analysis (Sacks, 1972, 1992).

Findings – Children draw upon the monolingual school norm of using Turkish only, and speaking Turkish correctly, by way of positioning themselves moment-to-moment during disputes with one another. Through repeated appeals to their teachers to relax the Turkish-only rule, they also collaboratively index “speaking English” as a positive category-bound activity (Cekaite & Evaldsson, 2008; Evaldsson, 2007), influencing the local moral order of the peer group.

Social implications/originality/value of chapter – The study provides a view of how children living in a transnational society orient to wider societal structures and “build the phenomenal and social worlds they inhabit” (Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2012) as part of their everyday disputes and negotiations with one another.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine everyday multilingual peer play interactions through their implications for the development of friendships among immigrant children.

Bringing together linguistic anthropology and conversation analysis as methodological approaches, this chapter explores friendship processes among Moroccan immigrant girls in Spain, specifically by analyzing the structure and composition of one such peer group, as well as their multilingual and multimodal interactions.

The main findings are that the multi-age, mixed-expertise composition of this peer group, as well as the semiotically flexible forms of participation and interaction that it encourages, are conducive to remarkably inclusive groups and strong friendships among a diverse group of Moroccan immigrant girls (including, younger and older girls, girls with disabilities and girls with very different immigration histories). Solid inclusive friendships are cemented in this peer interactional environment first because being able to interchangeably negotiate expert/novice participation roles in game interactions affirms feelings of social competence among all the girls, and second because achieving shared understandings in play entails successfully negotiating rules and expectations, which promotes trust and collaboration, while minimizing conflict. The inclusive nature of these girls’ peer-groups contrasts with the exclusion they encounter in other social settings and relationships.

In this sense, this chapter has important implications for understanding immigrant children’s abilities to respond to forms of social exclusion by forming diverse peer groups and strong friendships of their own. These friendships offer them a path to combat the marginalization they experience in other domains of social life.

Focused on multicultural service encounters, this paper aims to argue that the interplay between customer language preference, employee choice and use of language affects perceived interaction quality, which in turn influences loyalty, customer brand identification and positive word-of-mouth.

Using Mexican Americans (Spanish) as the focal ethnic group (language), a 3 (contexts: Fast food-English; Post office-English; Post office-Spanish) × 4 (scenarios: customer language preference adhered to; adapted to; mixed; ignored) between-subject scenario-based experiment was conducted.

Customers perceive a higher, or at least equal, level of interaction quality when the employee choice of language adheres to their preference than when the employee switches to their preferred language after missing it initially. Both of these scenarios lead to significantly higher interaction quality compared to when the employee ignores customer language preference or combines elements from two languages throughout the interaction. The adverse effects of ignoring customer preferred language or mixing it with another language are accentuated among customers with low ethnic identification and those with low level of bilingualism. Prior findings regard the interplay among interaction quality, and the remainder of outcomes variables were also corroborated.

The findings add to the literature that examines the dynamics of intercultural service encounters and draws attention to employee choice and use of language and its impact on a host of service outcomes, with interaction quality serving as a key mediator.

This study highlights the need for service firms to consider customer language preferences and train and empower employees to meet customer expectations. To the extent that the increasingly viable segments of minority customers remain underserved in most developed markets, this study provides insights into cultivating a profitable customer segment.

This study demonstrates the role of employee choice and use of language and its consequences.

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.