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Language and Social Interaction at Home and School
Edited by Letizia Caronia
[Dialogue Studies 32] 2021
► pp. 45–86

Chapter 1
Children’s socialization to multi-party interactive practices

Who talks to whom about what in family dinners

| Sorbonne Nouvelle University
| University of Lille
| Paris-Nanterre University
| Sorbonne University
| Sorbonne Nouvelle University – Paris 3
Multiparty interactions are crucial situations to study how children can participate in collaborative talk and broaden their experience of various interactional practices. Family dinners are particularly relevant to analyze how children and adults play different participatory roles and how parents implicitly socialize their children to complex interactional competences. We present a study of dinner talk in upper-middle-class Parisian families. We conducted quantitative analyses of the interactions using systematic coding according to three features: who participates as speaker, addressee or non-addressed identifiable listener for each utterance; who children and adults refer to in their conversational contributions; whether talk is about the here and now of the dinner or not. Results from our coding are complemented with detailed analyses of chosen extracts so as to provide a fuller picture of the identified features of dinner talk.
Keywords: language socialization, language development, multiparty interactions, family talk, French family dinners, dinner talk, participatory roles, home language practices, person reference
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.State of the art
    • 2.1A situated approach to language development
    • 2.2Family dinner as multi-party discourse
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Participant involvement in multiparty interactions
    • 4.1Speakers
    • 4.2Addressees
    • 4.3Involved participants
  • 5.The topics of family dinner interactions
    • 5.1Reference to self and others
    • 5.2Reference to dinner versus other activities
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ds.32.01mor
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