Eilitta2024

Eilitta2024
BibType	PHDTHESIS
Key	Eilittä2024
Author(s)	Tiina Eilittä
Title	How to engage: children's summonses to adults in families and kindergartens
Editor(s)
Tag(s)	EMCA, Child-adult interaction, Complexity, Conversation Analysis, Conversational openings, Embodiment, Family Interaction, kindergarten interaction, Multiactivity, Multimodality, Pre-sequence, Sequence organisation, Social Interaction, Summons, video-based analysis
Publisher	Oulun yliopisto
Year	2024
Language	English
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ISBN	978-952-62-3990-3
Organization	University of Oulu
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School
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Abstract

This article-based dissertation examines a social action that is fundamental for establishing joint attention and intersubjectivity: the summons action. It studies how summons actions are produced, focusing on the vocal and embodied details in which summonses are designed to establish joint attention in social interaction. This study focuses specifically on summons actions produced by children to adults (parents or caregivers). The thesis demonstrates how children’s summonses are carefully orchestrated, naturally situated and contingent accomplishments that reveal the complexities of interaction that reside in naturally occurring child-adult interactions. The analyses also explore how adults respond to children’s summons turns in mundane yet interactionally complex settings and how their responses socialise children into the norms of social interaction. This dissertation employs the method of conversation analysis to study naturally occurring child-adult interactions among family members in cars and at family homes, and among children and their caregivers in kindergartens. The studied languages are English and Finnish. This dissertation consists of a summary and three original research articles. The first article studies interactions between children and their parents in cars and shows how the differently positioned and designed summons turns mobilise responses from the parents to different degrees. The second article focuses on interactions between children and their parents at homes and demonstrates how the children pursue responses from the parents with self-repeated summonses and through embodied conduct, and thus establish favourable conditions for further interaction. The third article explores children’s telling-on actions in kindergartens and illustrates how the children’s summonses and other attention-drawing practices change the interactional ecology and thus lead to transformations in the local participation frameworks. This summary provides a synthesis of the three articles and discusses the significance of the findings.

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