Hearing children’s voices through a conversation analysis approach

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the methodological approach of conversation analysis (CA) and demonstrates its usefulness in presenting more authentic documentation and analysis of children’s voices. Grounded in ethnomethodology, CA has recently gained interest in the area of early childhood studies due to the affordances it holds for gaining access to children’s social interactions that would otherwise be unnoticed. It differs from psychological methods for the study of children’s social worlds in that it avoids using predefined categories of behaviour, and instead uses an inductive approach, allowing children’s voices to be understood in ways that are meaningful to children themselves.

A discussion around how CA has demonstrated its usefulness in the endeavour to hear children’s voices in early childhood education research and pedagogy will be given, including studies on children’s trauma talk and children’s cross-culture interactions in educational contexts. Transcriptions from a corpus of international data involving children aged 2½ – 4 years will be presented to show how CA supports researchers and teachers to fully realise the contribution children make to their own everyday lives as competent and capable citizens.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood education
• conversation analysis
• children’s voices
• co-construction of knowledge
• children’s trauma talk
• children’s cross-culture interactions

Acknowledgements

Thanks are given to the children, teachers and families who were involved in these projects.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Amanda Bateman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1492-5122

Additional information

Funding

I would like to acknowledge that funding was given for the projects from which transcripts 1, and 6 & 7 were taken, and thank the following organisations. Transcript 1 was taken from a project funded by the Teaching and Learning Research Initiative from NZCER for the study ‘Pedagogical Intersubjectivity’ (Bateman, 2012). Transcripts 6 and 7 were funded by Seed funding from the Office of Education Research, Queensland University of Technology, for the project titled, Better Friends Better Lives: Supporting Children’s Talk and Interaction in a Multilingual Setting, led by Dr Maryanne Theobald. University ethical approval for low risk human research (QUT Ethics Approval Number 1400000744).