Storytelling Practices in Home and Educational Contexts: Perspectives from Conversation Analysis 9811699542, 9789811699542

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Anna Filipi Binh Thanh Ta Maryanne Theobald   Editors

Storytelling Practices in Home and Educational Contexts Perspectives from Conversation Analysis

Storytelling Practices in Home and Educational Contexts

Anna Filipi · Binh Thanh Ta · Maryanne Theobald Editors

Storytelling Practices in Home and Educational Contexts Perspectives from Conversation Analysis

Editors Anna Filipi School of Curriculum, Teaching and Inclusive Education, Faculty of Education Monash University Clayton, VIC, Australia

Binh Thanh Ta Faculty of Medicine Nursing and Health Sciences Monash University Clayton, VIC, Australia

Maryanne Theobald Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, QLD, Australia

ISBN 978-981-16-9954-2 ISBN 978-981-16-9955-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9955-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022, corrected publication 2022 Chapters 8 and 10 are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapter. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Contents

Introduction 1

Storytelling Practices: Methods and Insights from Conversation Analysis and Their Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anna Filipi, Binh Thanh Ta, and Maryanne Theobald

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Storytelling Practices Part I: Children with Family 2

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Storytelling Practices with Children in the Home: Section Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anna Filipi, Maryanne Theobald, and Binh Thanh Ta

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The Shape of Child-Initiated Pretend Play in Interactions with a Parent at Ages 15 Months and 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anna Filipi

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Participating in Storytelling at Ages 3 and 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hansun Zhang Waring

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The Stories We Tell: Stories Within Family Mealtimes . . . . . . . . . . . . Gillian Busch, Maryanne Theobald, and Susan Danby

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Storytelling Practices Part II: School Aged Children and Youth with Adults and Peers 6

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Storytelling Practices of Preschool, Primary and Secondary School Children and Youth with Adults and Peers: Section Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maryanne Theobald, Binh Thanh Ta, and Anna Filipi

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Enduring Storytelling Dispositions in Early Childhood Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Amanda Bateman

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Making Culture Visible: Telling Small Stories in Busy Classrooms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Maryanne Theobald, Gillian Busch, Ilana Mushin, Lyndal O’Gorman, Cathy Nielson, Janet Watts, and Susan Danby

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The Collaborative Emergence of Storytelling in an After-School Foreign Language Primary Classroom . . . . . . . . . 149 Aya Watanabe

10 Telling in a Test: Storytelling and Task Accomplishment in L2 Oral Proficiency Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Erica Sandlund 11 Story Appreciation in Conversations-For-Learning: Stories and Gestalt-Contextures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Younhee Kim and Andrew P. Carlin 12 Invoking Personal Experience and Membership Categories: Syrian Students’ Tellings in Focus Groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Maxi Kupetz Storytelling Practices Part III: Practices in Higher Education 13 Storytelling Practices in Higher Education: Section Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 Binh Thanh Ta, Anna Filipi, and Maryanne Theobald 14 Exiting a Storytelling Sequence in Persian Language Classrooms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Elham Monfaredi 15 ‘I Remember When I Was in Spain’: Student-Teacher Storytelling in Online Collaborative Task Accomplishment . . . . . . . . 283 Melinda Dooly and Vincenza Tudini 16 Giving Advice Through Telling Hypothetical Stories in Doctoral Supervision Meetings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311 Binh Thanh Ta Storytelling Practices Part IV: Speakers of Different Languages 17 Storytelling Practices in the Home Between Speakers of Different Languages: Section Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337 Anna Filipi, Binh Thanh Ta, and Maryanne Theobald 18 Dealing with Disaligned and Misaligned Recipiency: Storytelling in Homestay Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343 Tim Greer

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19 “He’s not Aussie Aussie”: Membership Categorisation in Storytelling Among Family Members and Peers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375 Matthew Burdelski and Noriko Takei 20 Finding Action in Grammar: Two Cases from Storytelling in Multilingual Interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403 Jean Wong Conclusion 21 Considerations for Parenting, Education and L2 Speakers . . . . . . . . 427 Maryanne Theobald, Anna Filipi, and Binh Thanh Ta Correction to: Telling in a Test: Storytelling and Task Accomplishment in L2 Oral Proficiency Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Erica Sandlund

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Appendix: Transcription Notations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 441

Contributors

Amanda Bateman The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand Matthew Burdelski Osaka University, Suita, Japan Gillian Busch School of Education and the Arts, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton, Australia Andrew P. Carlin Ulster University, Coleraine, Northern Ireland Susan Danby Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia Melinda Dooly Department of Language and Literature Education and Social Science Education, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain Anna Filipi School of Curriculum, Teaching and Inclusive Education, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Clayton, Australia Tim Greer School of Languages and Communication and Graduate School of Intercultural Studies, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan Younhee Kim University of Macau, Macau, China Maxi Kupetz Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany Elham Monfaredi The University of Maryland-National Foreign Language Center (NFLC), University of Hawai‘i, M¯anoa, USA Ilana Mushin School of Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia Cathy Nielson Centre for Child and Family Studies, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia Lyndal O’Gorman School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education, Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

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Erica Sandlund Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden Binh Thanh Ta Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia Noriko Takei Momoyama Gakuin University, Izumi, Japan Maryanne Theobald School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education, Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia Vincenza Tudini Education Futures Academic Unit, University of South Australia, Barcelona, Spain Hansun Zhang Waring Applied Linguistics and TESOL, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA Aya Watanabe University of Fukui Language Centre, Fukui, Japan Janet Watts School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education, Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia Jean Wong The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ, USA

Introduction

Chapter 1

Storytelling Practices: Methods and Insights from Conversation Analysis and Their Applications Anna Filipi, Binh Thanh Ta, and Maryanne Theobald

Abstract This chapter sets out to provide the research context for the collection. It begins with an overview of the importance and place of storytelling as an intensely human activity. It then introduces conversation analysis by describing its methods derived from the amassed body of research in the field, accumulated since the 1960s. This provides the backdrop to introduce storytelling and the affordances of conversation analysis in the study of storytelling in general. The chapter ends with discussion about applications to learning and education, and the volume’s expected contribution to research in storytelling and to conversation analysis.

1.1 The Centrality of Storytelling to Human Interaction: Traditions and Approaches Storytelling is pervasive in human interaction. It is an essential defining characteristic of what it means to be human across all cultures, in all languages and across recorded time. A story is a “telling” and achieved through creating or recounting news or events. Stories might be situated also in the future, when a storyteller refers to the events that will be soon to occur. Stories may be based on real-life events, may be elaborated truths, or may be fictional or imagined. The telling and sharing of events are everyday social practices. Through storytelling, we are able to make sense of our experience to derive comfort and enjoyment and to understand what we share with others. We bring the past into the present A. Filipi (B) School of Curriculum, Teaching and Inclusive Education, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] B. T. Ta Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia M. Theobald Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice, School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 A. Filipi et al. (eds.), Storytelling Practices in Home and Educational Contexts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9955-9_1

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and both the past and present into invocations or imaginings of our future selves. Through our stories we connect to others within our immediate circles and more broadly to the societies in which we live. In doing so, we contribute to the history of a time and place. The COVID-19 pandemic during 2020 and 2021 has provided one very striking example of a global event that has generated a wealth of local and transnational personal stories as they have unfolded in the here and now. In time they will become one remembered story of humanity worth telling and retelling, shaped and reshaped to make it relevant to that time. Research interest in storytelling has mushroomed since Labov and Waletsky’s (1967) pioneering work on story (or oral narrative) structure. Bamberg and Georgakopolou (2008) distinguished “big stories”, which are concerned with past experience, from “small stories” where the concern is often with identity. A “big story”, according to Bamberg and Georgakopolou (2008), is understood in terms of its formal characteristics which include a temporal sequence of events, orientation, complicating action, coda, and evaluation together with reportability and credibility (Labov & Waletsky, 1997). Small stories are less bounded by past time and instead inclusive of shared events, hypothetical or future events, and even refusals or deferrals to tell (p. 381). In addition to a literary or narrative focus, research on storytelling has also been concerned with the indexicality of telling, with the dialogic and polyphonic nature of texts (Bakhtin, 2011), and with reflection in the sharing of life experiences that storytelling makes possible (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). As a result, ethnographic research methodologies have developed (e.g. Clandinin & Connelly’s, 2000, narrative inquiry) that use the tools of observation, interview, and document analysis (auto/biographies, oral histories, and letters) in the study of both oral and written texts. A conversation analytic (CA) approach (e.g. Sacks, 1984, 1992) provides a different dimension to and understanding of storytelling. Primary attention is directed to the telling as a conjointly achieved action rather than storytelling as narrative and as a genre. Premised on the ethnomethodological perspective of sense-making as being fundamentally about actions that are produced and organised in orderly and accountable ways (Garfinkel, 1967), a CA perspective brings to the table storytelling as a recognisable, collaborative, indexical, and interactional achievement between teller and recipient. It is conceptualised as the actions of speakers in interaction with each other to co-construct tellings as they accomplish a range of social projects (Mandelbaum, 2012) that are not limited or tied to telling about past events.

1.2 Methods of Conversation Analysis Each of the chapters in this volume uncovers the interactional practices in storytelling using the fine-grained methods of CA and naturally occurring data. Growing out of an ethnomethodological research tradition (Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984a), with a lens on uncovering the orderly, everyday practices that emerge through naturally occurring human interaction, CA is now a well-established field of research. It

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provides both empirically grounded research findings about human interaction and a set of analytic tools to uncover the systems that are fundamental to maintaining the orderliness of talk-in-interaction, conceived of as social action. The significance of the action can only be understood with reference to both its position in a sequence and to the interpretation of the action by the next speaker, achieved through the monitoring of a current turn—a “next turn proof procedure” (Sidnell, 2012). Analytical attention is directed to how speakers monitor and interpret a turn and build a next, appropriately fitted turn or deploy resources to resolve any problems that might stymie or threaten the progressivity of talk (Stivers & Robinson, 2006). Two overarching systems uncovered by this research are turn-taking and sequence organisation. Turn-taking refers to the set of rules that govern how a next speaker is selected (Sacks et al., 1974). Sequence organisation refers to how turns are organised moment-by-moment into sequences to create a local order comprised of turns, and an overall order framed by the opening and closing of the larger activity which is “sustained through multiple sequences” (Heritage & Sorjonen, 1994, p. 4), the case in storytelling. Within these broader systems lie epistemics—how speakers display their knowledge states and orientations to their co-participants’ knowledge status and stances, revealed sequentially (Heritage, 2012)—and repair—how speakers deal with misunderstanding, lack of hearing or problems in speaking to (re)establish intersubjectivity (Schegloff et al., 1977). CA is concerned with the interactional contributions of speakers as ideas of shared histories, identity, and belonging are co-constructed in talk-in-interaction. It highlights how members themselves work to affiliate with each other (Pomerantz & Heritage, 2012) in order to understand and organise, interpret, and respond to talk and to the actions of others using a range of resources. These resources include methods for initiating repair, ways of projecting and achieving agreement and alignment, and disagreement and disalignment where certain actions are preferred while others are dispreferred (Pomerantz, 1984); ways of displaying epistemic states and stances (Heritage, 1984b); ways of constructing identities through membership categorisation (Hester & Eglin, 1997; Sacks, 1972); ways of recruiting the assistance of others (Kendrick & Drew, 2016); the myriad ways and objects available to open, continue, and close interaction (Schegloff, 2007); and ways to project and display such actions in the roles of speaker and recipient. An inherent feature of CA is the close analytical attention to the minutiae of talk-ininteraction and to the organisation of turns through embodied actions as multimodal analyses have increasingly become the norm. The analyst engages in “unmotivated looking” (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998; Sacks, 1984) in which nothing is dismissed a priori. Also important to analysis are the emic concerns of the analyst who treats the actions as relevant only in so far as the speakers themselves display their relevance and import. The key to understanding their relevance only emerges through the sequential organisation and unfolding micro-moments in the interaction (Mori, 2002). The methods of CA briefly outlined above have produced rich findings about storytelling.

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1.3 Findings on Storytelling Using Perspectives from CA As the key analytical interest of CA is the accomplishment of actions and activities in talk-in-interaction, storytelling can be viewed both as an activity, achieved interactionally, and created over a number of turns and “sequences of sequences” (Liddicoat, 2007, p. 253), and as an interactional resource for accomplishing social actions. In viewing storytelling as both an interactional achievement and as an interactional resource, CA places emphasis on the action of telling rather than the story contents (Mandelbaum, 2012). In what follows we explicate the interactional features and discuss the possible interactional functions of storytelling by drawing on the body of research in CA from the past few decades.

1.3.1 Storytelling as an Interactional Achievement A storytelling may involve recounting past events experienced by the teller or others (Labov & Waletsky, 1967). It may also be about hypothetical events that the teller imagines or expects to occur (Goodwin, 1990, 2015). Depending on how telling is achieved in its sequential context, it can be interpreted (by the participants, hence by analysts) as troubles telling (Beach & Dixson, 2001; Jefferson, 1988, 2015; Peräkylä et al., 2008), joke telling (Holt, 2007; Sacks, 1974), or news telling (Butler & Weatherall, 2006). Although different types of storytelling vary in their interactional functions, they more or less share the following features. First, they are produced in an extended turn, which consists of two or more turn constructional units (e.g. The baby cried. The mommy picked it up.) (Sacks, 1992, v1, p. 265). This requires a suspension of the rules governing turn-by-turn talk, which is an interactional task that tellers and recipients need to manage. Second, it is achieved collaboratively; recipients play an active role in shaping how the story is told and what the story amounts to. Third, as in other forms of talk-in-interaction, its production involves the use and organisation of multimodal resources (i.e. prosody, gaze, gesture and other embodied actions). These three features are elaborated below. To achieve suspension of the turn-taking mechanism, the teller needs to signify that a story is forthcoming at the story opening as well as project its completion. Research in CA has shown how storytelling is projected through various resources. It can be projected in the pre-telling sequence, where the teller offers to tell a story, justifies its tellability, and recruits its recipients (Sacks, 1974). Storytelling projection can also be achieved through verbal markers produced at the beginning of the storytelling turn. These verbal markers may indicate references to time and/or place (Dingemanse et al., 2017) or establish the relationship between the incipient story and the prior talk (Jefferson, 1978). In addition, storytelling can also be projected through embodiment, for example, through pointing gestures which work to gain the floor (Eiko, 2011). At story closing, to ensure a smooth transition back to turn-by-turn talk, participants also need to negotiate completion points. These can be achieved through the use of

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story exit devices (Beach, 2000; Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998; Jefferson, 1978; Sacks, 1992). In terms of the collaborative achievement of storytelling, there is a body of research that demonstrates that recipients play a role in shaping the ongoing storytelling. For example, they can launch questions to clarify some aspects of the stories and draw attention to particular aspects, thereby influencing the direction of the ongoing storytelling (Koike, 2009; Mandelbaum, 1989, 2012; Monzoni & Drew, 2009). Recipients can negotiate the meanings of the stories (Kjaerbeck & Asmuß, 2005) leading to tellers’ elaborations or modifications of the projected points of the stories (Bercelli et al., 2008). Recipients who share first-hand or second-hand experiences may participate in joint-telling (Eiko, 2011; Koike, 2009; Mandelbaum, 1987; Sacks, 1992). Recipients who have similar experiences can also respond by launching a second story, a common feature of storytelling (Arminen, 2004; Ryave, 1978; Sacks, 1992; Sidnell, 2000; Theobald, 2016). Multimodal resources are important for projecting incipient stories, for producing the telling itself (Goodwin, 1984; Sidnell, 2006), and to indicate a resumption of the telling activity after an interruption due to an intervening action (Helisten, 2017). Furthermore, in order to enhance dramatic and/or humorous effects, storytellers may re-enact the gesture, body movement, and talk from the original context in which the event took place (Sidnell, 2006). Storytellers may also use gestures, facial expressions, and prosodic features to affectively engage recipients in the storytelling (Burdelski, 2016; Burdelski et al., 2014). These studies identify also how the responsiveness of recipients is critical to the accomplishment of storytelling. How tellers use multimodal resources to manage recipients’ responses has also been investigated in CA. For example, tellers draw on gaze to select the addressed recipient from among the co-participants in the talk (Goodwin, 1979), while pointing gestures are used to differentiate between explicit and implicit recipients (Koike, 2009). Investigated also are the ways in which both the teller and the knowing recipient position their bodies in the moment-by-moment telling when the protagonist of the story is present (Goodwin, 1984). As well, recipients have been found to display their orientations to different parts of storytelling through their gaze and body movements (Goodwin, 1984), while their voice quality has been found to be significant in displays of empathy with tellers (Muntigl et al., 2014). While not contingent on, it is clear that there is an association between these multimodal resources and the effectiveness of storytelling.

1.3.2 Storytelling as an Interactional Resource for Accomplishing Everyday and Institutional Matters The three interactional features just discussed are not only crucial for understanding how storytelling activity is produced, they are also relevant to examining the social actions, or the social projects of storytelling (Mandelbaum, 2012) accomplished

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through it (Schegloff, 1997). This is true for both everyday interactions and for institutional interactions. In everyday interactions, storytelling is used to support a variety of activites that participants are engaged in. They can be deployed to recount troubles (Conroy, 1999; Edwards, 1995; Jefferson, 1980, 1988, 1993; Jefferson & Lee, 1981), to restructure the social alignments and identities of participants (Goodwin, 1990), to manage complaints (Edwards, 2005; Mandelbaum, 1991), to display and attain intimacy (Coupland & Jaworski, 2003; Norrick, 2005), to account for conduct (Mandelbaum, 1993), to construct disagreements (Georgakopoulou, 2001), to counter coparticipants’ prior knowledge claims (Sidnell, 2000), and to establish mutual knowledge as the grounds for collaborative reconstruction of experiences (Nishikawa, 2011). Storytelling in institutional interaction has received increasing attention although it is still under-represented in comparison with everyday storytelling. Investigations have shown how it is shaped by its institutional contexts, and how institutional work is achieved through the deployment of storytelling. In medical settings, for example, patients use a storytelling format to explain their health problems in response to medical history-taking questions (Heritage & Robinson, 2006; Stivers & Heritage, 2001). This action allows them to provide unsolicited information, express concerns, and pursue objectives that depart from the agendas set by the doctors’ questions. From the doctor’s perspective, the patients’ stories constitute resources to understand the lifeworld of patients, which in turn serves the important purpose of facilitating care (Beach & Mandelbaum, 2005; Stivers & Heritage, 2001). A similar function has been observed in psychotherapy contexts where patients’ life stories provide therapists with materials to work with in dealing with their emotions. They also assist patients to re-interpret their experiences (Bercelli et al., 2008; Muntigl et al., 2014). In group therapy, group members have been found to produce second stories, which function to re-interpret the problems reported in firsts, and that lead to solutions (Arminen, 2004). Also in a clinical domain, studies on interactions between clinicians and parents or caretakers of children with disabilities (e.g. Kjaerbeck’s, 2008; Turowetz, 2015) show how storytelling functions in the clinicians’ diagnosis, but that it can also work to enable the parents to resist or disagree with the clinician’s assessment. Storytelling in these studies thus emerges as a powerful resource through which caretakers can assert their knowledge authority (regarding the experiences that the clinicians do not have access to) and resist their interpretations. In sum, storytelling is an important practice that is essential to everyday social activity. Its importance extends to the interactions that occur in institutions that make up our lives. Here, the functions of storytelling can serve the work that needs to be done by distributing knowledge and expertise. The current collection seeks to add to studies in the domains of home and education to this body of work in order to understand how storytelling emerges and changes over time, how incidental and formal learning are captured in the moment, and how interactional, professional, intercultural, and linguistic competence emerge as speakers interact.

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1.4 Conversation Analysis, Learning, Education and Their Applications As the title of this collection suggests, education and incidental, formal or potential learning offer an important and distinct focus on storytelling as a practice. This unique focus provides a lens with which to identify how children’s linguistic, interactional and intercultural competence and sense of self and place in the family through storytelling, are supported in the home, in the classroom or with reference to existing curriculum and developmental frameworks in the school context. It also provides a lens to explore the work, identity and practices of friends, teachers and lecturers in teaching, learning, reflection and supervision in higher education and in the home. In describing and identifying these practices, opportunities are created to assist parents and teachers, to inform pedagogy in teacher education, to support doctoral supervision and to elucidate cross-language interactional practices in the wild. With this aim in mind, contributors to this volume were asked to conclude their chapters by considering in what ways their reported findings about storytelling might have implications for practice through a set of recommendations. Discussion about the practical implications appears at first to create dissonance for CA researchers because such concerns stray from the “unmotivated looking” prescribed by Sacks (1984). However, practitioner researchers have long felt comfortable not just with describing turn-taking phenomena and the sequence organisation of talk-in-interaction (the epistemological concerns of CA research and methods), but also to consider implications for everyday and professional practice as a necessary outcome of research that can lead to change, the concerns of applied CA (Antaki, 2011). Indeed, not to consider implications, denies practitioners the empirically informed opportunities to change practice that become available through paying close attention to the details of interaction. In fact, applied research in CA goes back to the 1990s when attention to the classroom first started to gain momentum. Two early examples illustrate. In foreign languages, Cafarella (1997) and Filipi (1994, 1998) drawing on the same data, were among the first to conduct a CA analysis of a high-stakes foreign language examination that resulted in a set of implications and recommendations for teachers and students (Filipi) as well as for examiner training (Cafarella, Filipi). Both authors were examiners themselves, and in the case of Filipi, responsible for the training of examiners so that the studies drew from their practical experience and had direct application in the ensuing interventions. The research and subsequent changes were very specific to the context and were not meant to have application for adoption in other contexts. Using Markee’s (1997) model of curriculum change management or diffusion of innovations as a possible lens (also synthesised in Filipi and Markee (2018b) and Markee et al., (2021)), Cafarella and Filipi can be described as insiders whose recommendations for change offered examples of a problem-solving model where intervention and change are more likely to (and in fact did) succeed. A similar example is found in Barraja-Rohan’s (1997, 2011, also in Filipi & Barraja-Rohan, 2015) research of her own English as Additional Language (or

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English as a Second Language) (EAL/ESL) classroom. Barraja-Rohan (1997) was one of the first to propose a set of (seven) procedures to work on a specific interactional feature—authentic or more appropriate conversational openings and closings—noticeably missing in her students’ practice conversations. As the documented changes occurred in a specific context, Barraja-Rohan was able to report changes as a result of the intervention to show that impact is possible in a specific context. Although not characterised as such at the time, this was an early example of developmental CA, a controversial and by no means fully accepted research direction for CA (see Deppermann & Pekarek Doehler, 2021; Wagner et al., 2018). (See also the section overview in Part I for a brief discussion.) While developed for a specific classroom, the procedures have been subsequently used as an approach to guide other applied CA studies; e.g. by Cheng (2016) who applied it to assist her EAL students to develop awareness of disagreement in conversation. Cheng’s application demonstrates how research findings in CA, in specific educational and cultural settings, can be extrapolated for application in other contexts. The examples just discussed demonstrate how innovation in specific contexts on a smaller scale is as important and impactful as wider curriculum change. Also important to the success of these interventions was the fact that they involved practitioner-led research. Since these early studies, attention to the application of findings has increased exponentially, evident in the number of publications in the last five years on teaching and learning that in addition to describing interactional phenomena also offers recommendations to effect change in professional practice and pedagogy [see for example, the collections and monographs of Church and Bateman (2022), Filipi and Markee (2018a), Hall and Looney (2019), Huth (2020), Kunitz et al. (2021), Nguyen and Malabarba (2019), and Salaberry and Kunitz (2019)]. Using Antaki’s (2011) distinction between institutional and interventionist CA, Filipi and Markee (2018b) suggested ways in which studies in language and language teacher education could be aligned along a continuum. At one end, lie descriptive studies (more aligned with pure CA) which are principally concerned with providing empirical evidence for a variety of phenomena observed in the classroom. At the other, lie increasingly applied approaches that are aimed at explicit intervention where findings from CA are used to both raise awareness and to improve or change pedagogy. The concern with improvement and changes in practice constitutes a departure from CA. Applied CA is well-established as an approach in a number of professions. Perhaps the most enduring is Stokoe’s (2011) conversation analytic role-play method (CARM), initially developed for resolving neighbourhood conflict. The method entails using video and/or audio materials, role-play, and transcripts that include selfgenerated transcriptions to assist participants to move through a cycle that begins with participant awareness-raising and progressively enables participants to become analysts through practice and reflection. In teacher education, Church and Bateman (2020) have applied CARM to early childhood teacher education where naturally occurring data is used as the basis for building understanding and to “breathe” practice into the early childhood curriculum framework to make practical sense of it.

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A range of other sets of procedures similar to those discussed in Barraja-Rohan (1997, 2011) but in teacher education more broadly, have also been proposed by Waring (2021, SWEAR), Sert (2015, IMDAT, extended to include technology, Sert, 2021) and Walsh (2011, SETT). All three researchers emphasise the identification of interactional competence (IC) as a focus for iterative cycles of reflective practice. Such proposed teacher education models are more likely to effect change as they involve pre-service or future teachers, and CA informed teacher educators. Ideally, these educators are both researchers of CA and of pedagogy, and not just in language but across all curriculum areas. Defining what constitutes IC through empirical studies has been and continues to be a fundamental focus of recent work. Pekarek Doehler (2021) defines IC as involving displays of the ways in which speakers manage contingencies that arise through deployment of a set of procedures that are adapted to fit the context and that are relevant to the coparticipant. These include displays of skills in opening and closing conversations, in repairing understanding, and in monitoring talk in progress in order to take turns and respond in apposite ways (see also Hall et al., 2011). In language education, the contexts include investigations outside the language classroom (e.g. the collection in Hellermann et al., 2019), inside the language classroom including CA-SLA studies where methods of CA are adopted in research on second language acquisition (see, for example, the recent collection in Kunitz et al., 2021), and in language assessment and testing. In the latter, investigations are from the perspective of learner displays of IC and raters’ identification of what is to be understood and therefore assessable as IC (e.g. Huth & Betz, 2019; Salaberry & Kunitz, 2019; Sandlund & Greer, 2020; Sandlund & Sundqvist, 2019; Young & He, 1998). Beyond the classroom, IC has very obviously also been of great interest to researchers of early childhood studies (e.g. Filipi, 2019; Pfeiffer & Anna, 2021; Theobald, 2016). Interactional competence is a thread that runs through each chapter in the current collection. Storytelling is construed as an important part of a speaker’s IC (Pekarek Doehler, 2019), visible both in the storytelling practices of the teller and of the story recipient. Analytically, attention can be given to investigating competence at a particular moment in time and in a particular context (the focus of Burdelski & Takei, Dooly & Tudini, Gillian et al., Greer, Kim & Carlin, Kupetz, Monfaredi, Sandlund, Theobald et al., Wong, current volume). Here, the emphasis is on how competence is accomplished and achieved in situ and treated as such by the members within that interaction, rather than by external measures. In learning and in early childhood family contexts, IC can also provide a research focus to track or report changes, not necessarily in better ways of doing interaction, but rather in different ways gained through the experience of interacting. These are analytical concerns in Bateman, Filipi, Waring and Watanabe in the current volume. Returning to the recommendations that authors have been asked to formulate at the end of the chapters, the challenge has been to avoid prescriptive perspectives that are exogenous and instead formulate recommendations that are empirically derived from the data analysis. For some authors (of the more formal institutional contexts in the classroom), this has been less fraught than for others (the interactions in

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the home where learning is not the primary business of the interaction). Nonetheless, the authors have shown how IC emerges and is understood as participants orient to moments of learning through speakers’ storytelling practices such as repair, direct reported speech, multimodal resources, physical objects, the establishment of intersubjectivity and changes in participation frameworks. These are stories about practices that are worth telling.

1.5 Scope and Organisation of the Volume The collection in this volume brings together established and early career researchers from across the globe whose work is concerned with analysing storytelling microanalytically in order to understand and track storytelling practices cross-culturally, cross-sectionally, and longitudinally, in the home, at school, and in higher education. This gives the collection an international relevance and a multi-contextual focus which should appeal to a wide audience. The volume is organised in four sections. In Part I, the concern is with the storytelling practices of families in the home. In Part II, attention turns to the storytelling practices of preschool, primary, and secondary school children and youth with peers and adults. In Part III, the focus is on storytelling in higher education. In Part IV, attention shifts to the storytelling practices between adults and teenagers of different linguistic backgrounds. Each part is prefaced by an introduction that provides both a brief overview of previous studies and key themes, and a summary of the chapters. Notations used in the transcription (based on Jefferson, 2004) appear in the appendix, noting that in some chapters additional notations to capture nonverbal features are also included. It is anticipated that the focus on storytelling in the home and in education and the practical applications of the findings in this collection will make an original contribution to storytelling, education, intercultural communication, and CA.

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Storytelling Practices Part I: Children with Family

Chapter 2

Storytelling Practices with Children in the Home: Section Introduction Anna Filipi, Maryanne Theobald, and Binh Thanh Ta

Abstract The focus of this chapter is on storytelling in the home context. The chapter begins with an overview of previous research. This provides the background for the three studies featured in this section: Filipi and Waring, both concerned with showing changes in the children’s storytellings at two ages, and Busch et al., concerned with pursuing recipiency in multiparty tellings at the dinner table.

2.1 Background to the Studies In becoming members of society, children learn to co-produce talk and to display their understanding of the reflexive nature of interaction as they interact with family members and family friends who support children in their interactions. The supportive actions of adults, usually a parent in the first instance, facilitate participation in interaction well before words are formed (Filipi, 2009). This underscores the need for fine-grained multimodal analyses that go beyond words to capture what children can actually do. Such analyses have enabled substantial findings to emerge to show that by the time children are two, they have a solid interactional “machinery” in place and a toolbox that contains interactional resources that enable them to successfully participate in interaction (Filipi, 2009). They are thus able to take turns without overlap, coordinate their actions multimodally, initiate talk as well as respond in appropriately fitted ways, and deal with trouble through repair to (re)establish intersubjectivity. Their interactional competence and their displays of what it means to A. Filipi (B) School of Curriculum, Teaching and Inclusive Education, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Clayton, Australia e-mail: [email protected] M. Theobald School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education, Faculty of Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology, Education and Social Justice, Brisbane, Australia B. T. Ta Academic Support Unit, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 A. Filipi et al. (eds.), Storytelling Practices in Home and Educational Contexts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9955-9_2

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be a member of their group, enable the shaping of identity and build self-confidence, necessary for successful transitions from home, and for later achievement in school (see Bateman & Church, 2017; Burdelski & Evaldsson, 2019; Filipi, 2017a, 2017b; Forrester, 2015, 2017; Theobald, 2016; Theobald & Danby, 2017). Storytelling adds a particular set of knowledge and skills that furthers children’s interactional competence. In telling stories, children need to collaborate with a coparticipant. They need to monitor talk for an appropriate time to launch their story as a first (Jefferson, 1978) or second story (Sacks, 1992; Sidnell, 2010; and in young children, Theobald, 2016); they need to display the recognisability and newsworthiness of a story (Sacks, 1992; and in young children, Filipi, 2017a); and they need to display their understanding that the initiation of a telling is vulnerable if resources used to launch the story are not up to task. Children as young as nineteen months are able to do this through their embodied actions and deictic gestures in coordination with artefacts such as picture books, and prosodic or vocal marking (Heller, 2019). This early organisation of the practice gives way to the use of verbal resources such as guess what at a later age (from around the age of three) to initiate a telling (Filipi, 2019). More broadly, sharing and telling about personal events is a particularly ubiquitous feature of childhood interaction. Storytelling promotes language acquisition (Stevens et al., 2014). It also provides a vehicle for the socialisation of emotion (Cekaite & Björk-Willén, 2018) and encourages social connections with others (Theobald, 2016). Young children are socialised to monitor and regulate their behaviour in accordance with socially acceptable conduct (e.g. Kidwell, 2013). This is evident in the facilitating actions of the adults (who are often recruited) to assist children to cotell events; for example, in Filipi’s (2017b) analysis of the telling of a birthday event as it unfolds through the parent’s wh- and yes/no questions. Material resources may also come into play in tellings, particularly in storybook reading, either on paper or through digital devices, where adults and children draw upon the images provided by the picture books to collaboratively recount a sequence of events, display emotional stances and relate the events to their own social worlds (Kim & Tse Crepaldi, 2021; Radford & Mahon, 2010). Such resources might also generate stories about possible future events or occurrences. Finally, as stories are told for a range of social purposes (Mandelbaum, 2012; Schegloff, 1997), storytelling practices with children involve a range of genres and associated activities. This includes storybook reading, a crucial function of which is shared enjoyment (Cekaite & Björk-Willén, 2018). Storybook reading also creates opportunities for pretend and imaginary play (Nicolopoulou, 2016) as well as rich talk about the events depicted, affiliated with early literacy practices that support linguistic development. Storybook reading also often generates second stories as children are invited to or indeed make unsolicited connections between the events and lives of characters depicted, and their own lives (Filipi, 2019; Heller, 2019; Takada & Kawashima, 2019), creating further occasion for social development. Other genres are recounts (Burdelski, 2019; Filipi, 2017a, 2017b; Takagi, 2019) where children are invited to share the events of the day (known by one parent) to display what they know to others; and updates (Searles, 2019), where the events of the day are not known,

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and therefore newsworthy and triggered by something in the context. (These genres and others, together with their functions, are further discussed in a recent review in Filipi, 2022.) Important to social development are the opportunities for incremental experiences in interaction achieved through frequent participation. These experiences build understanding of discourse and contribute to cognitive development through memory construction (Bruner, 1986). Being able to successfully participate in interactions such as storytelling with adults and family members through the set of skills and knowledge just outlined, provides an evidence-based display of storying-in-action as children display social competence that continues to change over time.

2.2 The Contributions in This Section In this first section of the collection, attention lies with the beginnings of storytelling in the home as young children interact with a parent through pretend play (Filipi, current volume), with both parents over shared meals (Waring, current volume), or with family members over dinner (Busch et al., current volume). The analysis in each study pays attention to the ways in which young children participate in conjoint story creation to bring the outside world in through their observations of everyday life made visible in their tellings. Also visible are (1) the actions they deploy to manage local contingencies that arise in starting the story, in negotiating roles, in eliciting an apposite response from their co-speaker, in recipiently designing their stories; and (2) how these actions and stories differ based on age or how they change over time. Through these analytical concerns, each study adds to the small but growing body of research reviewed briefly above. Filipi’s study is concerned with the analysis of two episodes of pretend play between a parent and child aged 15 months and the same child at the age of three. Filipi concurs with Nicolopoulou (2016) that pretend play is an early form of storytelling, a position that permits her to contend that the episode at 15 months is the first reported instance of a child-initiated storytelling. The enacted story contains a recognisable story structure in which the child recreates a routine, shared experience from her daily life, that of going for a walk in the pram in which she takes on the role of parent. It is enacted through a series of mainly physical actions that are coordinated with vocalisations, gestures and objects in the physical space. The parent both facilitates the story and acts as a character. At age three, the child again initiates the pretend play but through greater verbal resources. She creates a second story from a favourite storybook, actively assigns roles, and suggests and negotiates story development with her parent, all based on her knowledge and experience of the world made visible through play. Waring’s study, similarly, attends to differences in a child’s storytelling over time. Waring’s focus is on a child aged three and again at age eight. Differences emerge in both story structure and story content. At age three, the child’s story telling is shaped by imaginative stories with monsters and heroes where good wins out over

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evil. The child’s story structure and delivery are also highly dramatic, including the canonical story announcements at both story beginning and end. Differences in story launching are also noticeable; at age three, the child is invited to tell for reasons of display for the absent parent. In contrast at age eight, the stories are recognisable as conversational stories based on lived experience. Even when the story is shared and the child is cast as co-teller, her perspectives on the story create newsworthiness. Notable too is that the story is told to achieve a social purpose. Finally, awareness of the importance of recipiency is also sharper as evident through the actions of launching a pursuit of “appropriate” recipient response for the story to succeed. Both of these chapters are concerned with showing how a specific storytelling practice changes through close analysis at two distinct moments in time. The issue of the contributions that CA can make to development (and more broadly to learning and/or acquisition discussed in the previous chapter) is by no means without controversy when the focus is on longitudinal change because of CA’s concerns with interaction as a local phenomenon tied to the here and now (Deppermann & Pekarek Doehler, 2021; Wagner et al., 2018). Bearing in mind that no two interactional contexts are the same (Waring, this volume), change can nonetheless be observed through paying attention to a specific interactional feature (for example, turn design or sequence structure) or resource. Such approaches, in previous studies on young children in the home, have yielded rich findings about repair initiation (e.g. Filipi, 2009; Forrester, 2008); request sequences (Wootton, 1994, 1997); turn designs to show increasing understanding of what constitutes “fitted” answers to questions (Forrester, 2015) or recipiently “fitted” utterances in the correct language (Filipi, 2015); practices in recruiting assistance (Pfeiffer & Anna, 2021); and changes in the response token yes (Filipi, 2018). In paying attention to two practices—pretend play in Filipi and storytelling as a social, conversational practice in Waring—these two chapters add to this small but important body of work. By attending to children’s social practices, they will also carve out an increasingly larger space in the developmental literature which is still dominated by psychology and its focus on cognition. The theme of pursuing recipiency reported by Waring (current volume) is also woven into the study by Busch et al.’s chapter. Here, attention turns to the multiparty tellings in a family, and the delicacy and need to manage a different set of contingencies where interactions involve more than two speakers. The data is drawn from two households at dinner where the families are sharing stories as they eat. The children range in age from 2;8 to 10;10. The younger children are shown to be supported by the adults as they manage the launching and telling of their stories. The older children, on the other hand, possess a variety of verbal and embodied resources. These are deployed to launch and announce their stories and to select their recipient. The analysis also points to the ways in which children deal with the vulnerability of maintaining their recipients’ continued interest—using laughter for example— thereby securing the successful outcome of bringing their story to completion. The study’s importance lies in both exposing storytelling practices between siblings and its focus on older children, an often neglected age group.

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References Bateman, A., & Church, A. (Eds.) (2017). Children’s knowledge-in-interaction: Studies in conversation analysis. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1703-2_1 Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Harvard University Press. Burdelski, M. (2019). Young children’s multimodal participation in storytelling: Analyzing talk and gesture in Japanese family interaction. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 3(1–2), 6–35. https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.38982 Burdelski, M., & Evaldsson, A. C. (2019). Young children’s multimodal and collaborative tellings in family and preschool interaction. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 3(1–2), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.38982 Busch, G., Theobald, M., & Danby, S. (current volume). The stories we tell: Stories within family mealtimes. In A. Filipi, B. T. Ta, & M. Theobald (Eds.), Storytelling practices in the home and in educational contexts: Perspectives from conversation analysis. Springer. Cekaite, A., & Björk-Willén, P. (2018). Enchantment in storytelling: Co-operation and participation in children’s aesthetic experience. Linguistics and Education, 48, 52–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.linged.2018.08.005 Deppermann, A., & Pekarek Doehler, S. (2021). Longitudinal conversation analysis. Introduction to the special issue. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 54(2), 127–141. https://doi. org/10.1080/08351813.2021.1899707 Filipi, A. (2009). Toddler and parent interaction: The organization of gaze, pointing and vocalization. John Benjamins. Filipi, A. (2015). The development of recipient design in bilingual child-parent interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 48(1), 100–119. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2015. 993858 Filipi, A. (2017). Exploring the recognisability of early story-telling through an interactional lens. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 1(2), 141–163. https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.31370 Filipi, A. (2017b). The emergence of early story-telling. In A. Bateman & A. Church (Eds.), Children and knowledge-in-interaction: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 279–295). Springer. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1703-2_15 Filipi, A. (2018). Making knowing visible: Tracking the development of the response token yes. In S. Pekarek Doehler, J. Wagner, & E. González-Martínez (Eds.), Longitudinal studies in conversation analysis (pp. 39–66). Palgrave MacMillan. Filipi, A. (2019). Snapshots of how story-telling is triggered in interactions with children aged two, three and three and a half. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 3(1–2), 119–143. https:// doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.37285 Filipi, A. (2022). Storytelling. In A. Church & A. Bateman (Eds.), Talking with children: A handbook of early years education (pp. 185–203). Cambridge University Press. Filipi, A. (current volume). The shape and functions of pretend play in interactions with a parent at ages 15 months and 3. In A. Filipi, B. T. Ta & M. Theobald (Eds.), Storytelling practices in the home and in educational contexts: Perspectives from conversation analysis. Springer. Filipi, A., Ta, Binh, T., & Theobald, M. (current volume). The centrality of storytelling to human interaction: Methods and insights from conversation analysis. In A. Filipi, B. T. Ta, & M. Theobald (Eds.), Storytelling practices in the home and in educational contexts: Perspectives from conversation analysis. Springer. Forrester, M. (2008). The emergence of self-repair: A case-study of one child during the early preschool years. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 41, 99–128. https://doi.org/10. 1080/08351810701691206 Forrester, M. A. (2015). Early social interaction: A case comparison of developmental pragmatics and psychoanalytic theory. Cambridge University Press. Forrester, M. A. (2017). Learning how to use the word ‘know’: Examples from a single-case study. In A. Bateman & A. Church (Eds.), Children’s knowledge-in-interaction: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 257–278). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1703-2_14

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Heller, V. (2019). Embodied displacements in young German children’s storytelling: Layering of spaces, voices and bodies. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 3(1–2), 168–195. https:// doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.37311 Jefferson, G. (1978). Sequential aspects of storytelling in conversation. In J. Schenkein (Ed.), Studies in the organization of conversational interaction (pp. 213–248). Academic. Kim, Y., & Tse Crepaldi, E. (2020). Co-constructed storytelling as a site for socialization in parent–child interaction: A case from a Malay-English bilingual family in Singapore. Journal of Pragmatics, 172, 167–180. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2020.11.019 Kidwell, M. (2013). Troubles with ‘availability’ in directive-response sequences. In M. Hayashi, G. Raymond, & J. Sidnell (Eds.), Conversational repair and human understanding (pp. 234–260). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511757464.008 Nicolopoulou, A. (2016). Young children’s pretend play and storytelling as modes of narrative activity. In S. Douglas & L. Stirling (Eds.), Children’s play, pretense, and story: Studies in culture, context, and autism spectrum disorder (pp. 6–27). Routledge. Pfeiffer, M., & Anna, M. (2021). Recruiting assistance in early childhood: Longitudinal changes in the use of ‘oh+x’ as a way of reporting trouble in German. Special Issue, Research on Language and Social Interaction, 54(2), 142–162. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2021.1899708 Radford, J. A., & Mahon, M. (2010). Multimodal participation in storybook sharing. In H. Gardner & M. Forrester (Eds.), Analysing interactions in childhood: Insights from conversation analysis (pp. 209–226). Wiley. Schegloff, E. (1997). “Narrative Analysis” thirty years later. Special Issue, Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7, 97–106. https://doi.org/10.1075/jnlh.7.11nar Searles, D. K. (2019). Positioning updates as relevant: An analysis of child-initiated updating in American and Canadian families. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 3(1–2), 144–167. https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.37286 Sidnell, J. (2010). Conversation analysis. Wiley-Blackwell. Takada, A., & Kawashima, M. (2019). Caregivers’ strategies for eliciting storytelling from toddlers in Japanese caregiver–child picture book reading activities. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 3(1–2), 196–223. https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.37287 Takagi, T. (2019). Referring to past actions in caregiver–child interaction in Japanese. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 3(1–2), 92–118. https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.37384 Theobald, M. (2016). Achieving competence: The interactional features of children’s storytelling. Childhood, 23(10), 87–104. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568215571619 Theobald, M., & Danby, S. (2017). Co-producing cultural knowledge: Children telling tales in the school playground. In A. Church & A. Bateman (Eds.), Children’s knowledge-in-interaction: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 111–125). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-101703-2_7 Wagner, J., Doehler Pekarek, S., & González- Martínez, E. (2018). Longitudinal research on the organisation of social interaction: Current developments and methodological challenges. In S. Pekarek Doehler, J. Wagner, & E. González-Martínez (Eds.), Longitudinal studies on the organization of social interaction (pp. 3–36). Palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-570 07-9_1 Waring, H. Z. (current volume). Participating in storytelling at ages 3 and 8. In A. Filipi, B. T. Ta, & M. Theobald (Eds.), Storytelling practices in the home and in educational contexts: Perspectives from conversation analysis. Springer. Wootton, A. J. (1994). Object transfer, intersubjectivity and third position repair: Early developmental observations of one child. Journal of Child Language, 21(3), 543–564. Wootton, A. J. (1997). Interaction and the development of mind. Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 3

The Shape of Child-Initiated Pretend Play in Interactions with a Parent at Ages 15 Months and 3 Anna Filipi

Abstract Recently, family storytelling practices from the perspective of conversation analysis have occupied intense research interest. Studies within this tradition have shed light on children’s participation in tellings, interactional competence, bilingual practices, the displays of knowledge and changes in their participation over time. The focus in these studies has mainly been on storybook reading and invitations to recount events. In the study to be reported here, episodes of pretend play were analysed. The samples selected for analysis pertained to one child, Rosie, while interacting with her mother at the ages of 15 months and 3. Attention to interactional changes in pretend play was an additional focus. The analytic interest of the study was to show how Rosie at 15 months initiated pretend play through embodied resources using toys or objects that were immediately available in the physical space as they became characters and objects through the supported actions of the mother. At the age of 3, Rosie initiated the enacted story through a greater number of verbal resources including voice projection and the “I know + pause + you can be” role suggestion format. The study’s contribution to the field lies in reporting the earliest example of storytelling and in showing how fine-grained multimodal analysis of naturally occurring interactions is extremely important if we are to get at what very young children can actually do in interaction.

3.1 Introduction In the research on children’s storytelling, two issues that are relevant to the study to be reported have provoked disagreement. The first is the question about when children start to initiate stories. A cursory search of the literature places the emergence of these practices at different ages—anywhere between 19 and 30 months (Engel, 1995; Filipi, 2017a; Heller, 2019; Miller & Sperry, 1988). The disparity can be explained both by the different lenses used to analyse the data as well as definitions about what A. Filipi (B) School of Curriculum, Teaching and Inclusive Education, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 A. Filipi et al. (eds.), Storytelling Practices in Home and Educational Contexts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9955-9_3

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constitutes storytelling or narratives. Typically studies that report the emergence of the practice as occurring earlier are concerned with the interactional properties of storytelling using the microanalytic methods of conversation analysis (CA) (e.g. Hutchby & Wooffitt, 2008; Schegloff, 1991). Increasingly these methods include the study of embodied action, crucial to the study of very young children’s interactions as it permits a different level of understanding about how very young children participate in interaction (Filipi, 2009; Heller, 2019). The outcome of applying these analytic methods is likely to show that very young children initiate action in talk-in-interaction rather than merely respond to a parent’s initiation. It is exactly this approach that Heller (2019) adopted to examine early storytelling practices which led to her findings that a child as young as 19 months was initiating storytelling. The second more controversial issue is to consider what constitutes storytelling (on this controversy, see Nicolopoulou & Ilgaz, 2013). Research mainly from within developmental psychology has long held the view that pretend play is a form of enacted storytelling (Nicolopoulou, 2016; Snow et al., 2001). According to Nicolopoulou (2016), pretend play involves “narrative activity” which has led her to conclude that it complements storytelling modes so that they eventually converge developmentally. The study to be reported in this chapter holds that pretend play is an early form of storytelling. It aims to show the ways in which episodes of pretend play are recognisable as the earliest forms of child-initiated storytelling, which I argue is an important finding. This will be done through analysis of two episodes of pretend play between Rosie, aged 15 months and 3, interacting with her mother. By focussing on the two ages through a microanalytic, multimodal lens, rich findings will emerge to show the changes in how the interactions are organised while continuing to be a co-produced achievement of mother and child. The chapter begins with an overview of prior research followed by the research design. Next the analysis and discussion of the two selected episodes will be presented. The chapter ends with a general discussion about the uniqueness of the findings and concludes with a set of suggestions for the ways in which findings might be translated into practical applications for families.

3.2 Background 3.2.1 Storytelling in Early Childhood and Their Purposes Through the practice of storytelling in the home, very young children become socialised as members of society. The practice begins through the simple actions of parents reading to their children, engaging with them in pretend play and inviting them to share accounts of the events in their lives. These storytelling activities provide a foundation for the practice to continue when children go to school.

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Storytelling fulfils a variety of “social projects” (Mandelbaum, 2012). It can satisfy affective purposes where children enjoy listening to and/or (re)telling stories heard (Bateman, 2020; Cekaite & Björk-Willén, 2018). It can provide children with an opportunity to imagine the experiences of others as they take other people’s perspectives through playing a variety of social roles (Heller, 2019). Participation in storytelling, in turn, creates opportunities to build identity (Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2011; Theobald, 2019). Storytelling can also play an important role in children’s mental health when they are invited to share traumatic events in everyday conversations (Bateman & Danby, 2013; Bateman et al., 2015). Through each of these forms of telling, children develop both interactional and linguistic competence, which are fundamental for literacy and success in school (Bateman, 2018; Snow et al., 2001). They create opportunities and experience for children to build confidence as they engage socially with a range of others including family members (Blum-Kulka, 1990; Busch et al., current volume; Filipi, 2017b; McCabe & Peterson, 1991; Waring, current volume), peers (Bateman, current volume; Theobald, 2016; Theobald & Reynolds, 2015) and teachers (Bateman & Carr, 2017; Theobald, 2019; Theobald et al., current volume). Storytelling in childhood takes many forms. The most obvious is storybook reading which occurs both through hard-book and digital formats. An important feature of storybook reading is the discussion that takes place. This starts with naming pictures (Chiong & DeLoache, 2012; Fletcher & Reese, 2005; Potter & Haynes, 2000) and eventually leads to richer discussions not only of the stories read but also of second stories (Sacks, 1992) that are generated as the participants draw comparisons with events in their own lives (Filipi, 2017a, 2019; Reese, 1995; Takada & Kawashima, 2019). Another form of storytelling is found in relating personal news through updates (Searles, 2019) or through recounts of shared events (Burdelski, 2019; Farrant & Reese, 2000; Morita, 2019; Takagi, 2019; Waring, current volume). Also pervasive are spontaneous and planned imaginative storytellings which children share with peers, teachers and parents (Bateman, 2020; Theobald, 2019; Waring, current volume). These can entail enactment where stories are brought to life in pretend play (Bateman, 2018, current volume; Nicolopoulou, 2016; Snow, et al., 2001).

3.2.2 Pretend Play The importance of narrative or storytelling to the development of literacy and future success in school (Snow & Tabors, 1993) has provided a strong incentive for the study of children’s early pretend play. Kavanaugh (2006) and Ilgaz and Aksu-Koç (2005) maintain that there are synergies between the structure of pretend play and children’s storytelling and comprehension such that there is a striking relationship between the two. This has prompted Nicolopoulou (2005, 2016) to suggest that pretend play sits on a developmental continuum where the discursive properties of storytelling complement the enacted narratives or “scenarios” in pretend play. Nicolopoulou

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(2011, 2016) also brings attention to the importance of the social context while at the same time adopting the view (based on theorists such as Bruner) that narratives entail cognitive processes in the construction of reality. Taking a developmental perspective and a position that pretend play contributes to children’s development, Nicolopoulou (2005, 2016) and Nicolopoulou and Ilgaz (2013) maintain that providing experiences in pretend play contributes to children’s development as a range of cognitive processes are implicated. These include memory, the ability to take the perspectives of others (associated with theory of mind (Lillard & Kavanaugh, 2014)), skills in preparing for play and commenting on action (Boyd, 2009), skills in developing the story through a plot and characters that involve understanding that negotiation and adjustments to storylines may need to be made in concert with others, and opportunities to explore identity. According to Nicolopoulou (2016), these are skills that develop over time. As far as I’m aware, from a CA perspective, there is only one study by Bateman (2018) that has explicitly examined pretend play as a storytelling event rather than from the perspective of children’s moral and social orders in resolving disputes (e.g. Cobb-Moore, 2012) or in negotiating roles for themselves (Björk-Willén, 2012). Bateman’s (2018) study, located in preschool and in the first year of school, was concerned with showing how children co-created spontaneous stories through ventriloquism (or voice projection, Harris, 2000) and embodied actions. Through these resources, the children created stories that were recognisable and coherent, and that were sensitive to progressivity and changes in plot direction. The co-created, enacted stories acted as harbingers of written storytelling. In synthesising the relevance of the above reviewed studies, this chapter will build on prior research to show how pretend play begins through embodied interaction with a parent who supports the child to direct and develop the enacted story. Interactional competence over time (as described for instance in Filipi, 2019) is also focussed on in comparing the episodes at the two selected ages.

3.3 Data and Method Two episodes depicting Rosie interacting with her mother have been selected for this chapter. They come from a large data set collected fortnightly in Australia for 30-min sessions over a 27 month period involving four child–parent dyads. The researcher was sometimes present during the recordings as was the case in the second episode selected for analysis. Ethical procedures were followed for data collection, recruitment and with respect to consent. Collection of data commenced when Rosie was 9 months old and continued until she was aged two. A further one-hour sample was collected when Rosie was aged 3. In selecting the episodes for analysis, I sought pretend play sequences where the play appeared to be clearly initiated by Rosie rather than the mother, and where the actual story enactment involved co-production rather than imaginary self-play. These started to appear when Rosie was producing one-word verbal utterances at the

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age of 15 months but was participating in rich interactions largely through embodied actions. (See Filipi, 2009, for extended analysis and discussion of the quality of the interactions in general at this age for the same data set.) For the purposes of comparison in order to capture change, an episode from the final session when Rosie was aged three was also sought. The episodes thus provide a window on the social and sequence structural qualities of early enacted storytelling as displayed through the collaborative actions of parent and child as they unfold turn-by-turn, where the enacted story is clearly begun and developed even if not completed. Both episodes occurred in the home.

3.3.1 Analytical Methods Analysis of the data follows the methods of CA as outlined in Chap. 1 of this volume where interaction is understood as a set of multimodal actions. These actions are organised through turns that are designed with reference to speakers’ interpretation of the prior turn(s) and their epistemic positions (Heritage, 2012). In this way, talk is built to establish, display and achieve intersubjectivity. It also affords an opportunity to examine how membership to a group or category is achieved (Evaldsson, 2007; Kyratzis & Goodwin, 2017; Pomerantz & Mandelbaum, 2005). The latter is important in exploring children’s identity shifts in storytelling. The turns themselves are organised in sequences (Schegloff, 2007), and sequences are organised into larger episodes (Schegloff, 2010) where a single activity (in this case, enacted storytelling) is constructed through stretches of talk and sustained through multiunit turns across sequences (Heritage & Sorjonen, 1994). The analysis is conducted through a microanalytic lens launched to capture both verbal and nonverbal minutiae of talk, including embodiment and prosody and not just words. With respect to the analysis of children’s interactions, attention to both what is said and to how something is said and done through the body and voice uncovers both how interactionally competent very young children can be, and the complexity of the interactional resources they deploy to engage in interaction (as reported for example in Filipi, 2009). Transcription notations used in the extracts are consistent with each of the chapters in this volume that follow the Jeffersonian system (Jefferson, 2004). The following additions from Filipi (2007) are used to denote nonverbal features: --- → to indicate gaze, TU to indicate turning towards, P--- → to indicate pointing to, and the curly bracket { to indicate the onset of a nonverbal action.

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3.4 Analysis and Discussion 3.4.1 Pretend Play at 15 Months Extracts 1 and 2 from the same episode provide an analysis of an early form of storytelling that occurs through enactment and therefore is relevant at an age when the child is largely achieving successful interactions with those around her through multimodal resources (Filipi, 2009). This episode of early pretend play is typical at this early age when the child is producing single word utterances in turns that are filled with physical actions and vocalisations. Socially, these early pretend play episodes provide opportunities for the child to draw on and replicate or play out her daily experience in concert with, in Vygotskian terms, more competent others (see Vygotsky, 1978). Like the recounting of daily events, in this episode the pretend play draws on one of Rosie’s routine experiences, that of being taken out for daily walks in her pram by her parents; so she is reimagining and re-enacting the experience by taking on the role of the parent or the responsible adult. As the episode is very long, the transcript will be broken into two parts. Extract 1 is concerned with preparation for the pretend play as well as initiating the pretend walk. The mother has just brought a doll and stuffed toys into the room. Rosie abandons the blocks she has been playing with and picks up Teddy and Clown. She moves towards the pram. Important to the analysis is the fact that Rosie and her mother move in and out of play as they manage the scene through setting up the objects that are important in creating the story. To be noted is that throughout the episode, play is interrupted. Interruptions of this nature are part of these early episodes and offer displays of the ways in which the mother supports the child in play but also the means by which the child herself recruits the mother’s help. Extract 1: Getting ready for the pretend play and for the walk 1 2

MOT: ROS:

are you gonna put them in the pram? (0.8)((Drops Clown and proceeds to place Teddy into the pram and starts to move the pram.)) 3 MOT: are you gonna take teddy {for a walk? ROS: {((P--- pram.)) 4 (0.3) 5 MOT: in the pram? 6 (0.9) 7 ROS: eh? 8 MOT: are you? 9 ROS: ((Vocalises and nods.)) 10 MOS: oh$:: lucky teddy. ((Lines 11-45, Rosie continues to push the pram; she takes teddy out and places it with the other toys. Finally, she picks up Clown and hands it to her mother. Frustrated cries accompany the actions as she works to make herself understood.))

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46 MOT: 47 ROS: 48 49

{shall we {put clown in the pram? {((Nods)) {((TU --- pram.)) (0.4) {(( )) {((Nods)) 50 MOT: yes? ((Lines 51-58 M puts clown in the pram. Repeated exclamations of more from Rosie as she crawls towards the pram holding the doll and teddy.)) 59 MOT: 60 (2.4) ((Rosie points to the doll.)) 61 ye::s ( ) 62 what about BA:by? 63 >shall we put baby in