Overview

This book offers a rich and detailed empirical account of children's play and interaction in the school playground. Drawing on the approaches of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, 'Talk and Social Interaction in the Playground' examines the organisation of membership and social action in a game created by a group of children. It offers rich insights into the methods and practices used by children to produce play and social order, making a significant and substantial contribution to the study of talk-in-interaction, as well as to studies of children's play, competencies, and social interaction. The book demonstrates the importance of putting aside preconceived assumptions about how children talk and interact in order to reveal the situated methods and practices that children use - not because they are children, but because they are social beings. As well as appealing to scholars of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, ’Talk and Social Interaction in the Playground’ will be of interest to students and researchers in a range of disciplines, including child studies, developmental psychology, education, applied linguistics, and sociology.

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9780754674160

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Reviews

'Readers have long awaited a book that gives children's interactions serious consideration. Picking up where Sacks, Speier and Mackay left off, Butler's analysis revitalizes the ethnomethodological inquiry into children's practical reasoning and action. Narrowing the gap left wide open by overtheorized sociological accounts of childhood, this book may well become the landmark of a new generation of child studies.' Jakob Cromdal, Linkoping University, Sweden 'A masterful and fascinating study using talk-in-interaction to examine the everyday social practices of young children in the playground. Important and innovative, this book invites us, in the most persuasive way, to understand young children as competent members of their social worlds, who draw strategically on the interactional, place and material resources at hand, and who are skilled and expert in manipulating these strategically to get the business at hand accomplished.' Susan Danby, Queensland University of Technology, Australia 'I found Butler's analysis both convincing and effective in highlighting the role played by membership categories in sequential organisation of children's activities, especially since she rigorously attends to the situated and always emerging nature of the categories themselves.' Language in Society

Author Information

Carly Butler is Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology at Loughborough University, UK. .

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