Environments for Imitation: Second-Language Use and Development Through Embodied Participation in Preschool Routine Activities

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the environment and routines within preschools can support second language use and development. It suggests that certain imitable aspects common to Swedish preschools make the environment suitable for L2 use and development. Data build on a qualitative synthesis of two studies from which typical routine activities where children with Swedish as L2 participate are analyzed. It is suggested that properties of the preschool routine activities follow certain interactional patterns and build on imitable cultural scripts that can aid L2 use through embodied participation or nonverbal and verbal interaction. The settings are as such suitable for child participation and can afford L2 development. In children’s play, the same cultural patterns and forms of language are used, making them an extension of some routine activities and an important arena to practice cultural knowledge with the developing L2.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication
• cultural affordances
• early care and education
• embodiment
• guided play
• language development
• play environments
• second language learning

In recent times, societies have become increasingly multilingual as a consequence of globalization and the migration of people for various reasons. These societal changes are also transforming linguistic practices (cf. Blommaert, 2013). This transformation moreover applies to education institutions, something that is evident at the Swedish preschool level. In Sweden, 95% of children age 3–5 years old are enrolled in the state-funded preschool system and 5% of these children are recently arrived in the country (The Swedish National Agency for Education, 2017). As people find themselves in new cultural and linguistic environments, children need to adapt to and participate in their new settings rapidly. This article studies how children with Swedish as their L2 come to participate in their new language, supported by an interaction in the routines of the early childhood setting in which they are becoming immersed.

The central premise of the article builds on the presumption that children can understand the intention of others’ actions and that actions are set within activities that are a part of the culture and its practices, their common understandings and goals. As such, imitation is not only a way of doing what others do but also can be a way of aligning with the cultural activities in which they are taking place (Cole, 1996; Tomasello, 1999). In this way, the development of a language (L1 or L2) should also be seen as intertwined with participation in the cultural activities in which they are used.

Cultures are, in significant ways, patterned through repeated activities, practices, and materialized in institutions with shared values, rules, and codes of conduct. Also, cultures are somewhat marked by linguistic homogeneity as needed for intersubjective understanding between people. In short, such properties can be perceived as cultural affordances (Ramstead, Veissière, & Kirmayer, 2016), or structures for action that allow people to act purposefully within a community. These characteristics also transform the activities in which people engage into imitable entities, as commonly seen in how common behaviors, words, etc. are frequently repeated in a community.

Participation in cultural activities is not solely a linguistic endeavor, and cultural affordances consist of behaviors and bodily experienced meaning. When humans are placed in new settings, they are usually expected to increase their participation in collective activities over time (cf. Lave & Wenger, 1991). One such arena where children are placed with fewer means of participation in the majority language than their peers is the preschool. In this setting, children are required to interact with few commonly shared linguistic means and are seen to participate in activities without verbally saying anything, to later increasingly “chiming in” to the conversation (Rogoff, 2003).

This article aims to study how the specific environments and routine activities of the preschool provide affordances for children’s participation. It argues how routinization of activities, and imitable patterns of environments, enable children to participate through both non-verbal and verbal means, which will be coined as embodied participation in this article.

The article does this by addressing the following research questions:

1. How do routines in the preschool environment provide structure for children’s participation and emergent language use?

2. How can play promote child participation? Does children’s play adopt the cultural routines children encounter?

Routines, play, and second-language learning in preschool

Preschool settings operate on a scale in terms of how structured the child’s day is, ranging from the more academically oriented, with more teacher-led activities, to those allowing more free play. Large-scale studies of structured settings with teachers’ instructional or scaffolding activities have associated children’s enrollment to these with school-readiness, measured by academic achievements such as vocabulary score, showing an especially strong correlation for children from low-income families (Chien et al., 2010).

In opposition to an overly unbalanced focus on school-readiness, Miller and Almon (2009), among others, have voiced concerns about the elimination of play in early childhood settings, pointing out its necessity in many areas of children’s development, both in the academic and socio-emotional realms. It should be noted here that even the most structured preschool settings still allow substantial time for children’s free-choice activities. Fuligni, Howes, Huang, Hong, and Lara-Cinisomo (2012) found positive academic outcomes for “balanced-structured” environments, where the most structured preschools still allowed 32% of the day for children’s free-choice activities.

One central instructional activity at the preschools is circle time, which Bustamante, Hindman, Champagne, and Wasik (2018) find to be “near universal” at preschools. Interactionally, circle time has a structure that is in many ways a preparation for the interactional routines children will later encounter in school, such as raising their hands, waiting for their turn, and answering to the teacher to be evaluated. This type of interactional structure of conversations was identified by Mehan (1979) as I-R-E (initiation-response-evaluation), as the prototypical interactional structure on classrooms that is still common to many school settings (Walldén, 2019). These type of routines are significantly structured, and according to Blum-Kulka and Gorbatt (2014), almost “ritualistic” in that conversations structured such as I-R-E and common phrases for answering are being iterated almost daily (e.g., raising one’s hand and answering “it is a/an X”). While this indeed provides the linguistic structure that can aid children’s participation in their L2, Bustamante et al. (2018) still caution that circle time in many early childhood settings is of “low quality” with regard to “linguistic richness” and might be too much of a memorization practice. As with many pedagogical activities, there is a crucial question concerning how structured it can be while also providing stimulation for children (cf. Bonawitz et al., 2011). These queries are further discussed within the analysis of examples provided later.

The entry into a new language in early childhood is not necessarily only a linguistic achievement. Tabors (1997) noted how children new to a culture and language go through phases where they use a range of communicative means to participate in the new community. Blum-Kulka and Gorbatt (2014) identified stages of silence followed by the emerging use of the L2 combined with non-verbal means. This later stage is central to this study because the children under study are using a range of communicative means as part of their embodied participation; for example, children use deictic gesturing or showing something with bodily movement to express something they cannot or would not express in their L2. Moreover, this study probes into how the preschool environments and routines support participation at this stage.

Similarly, Cekaite (2007) followed a newly arrived girl in an immersion classroom over a school year and noticed interactional development. The girl started school with simple phrases and greetings. During the school year, she developed her linguistic abilities considerably. That, combined with being socialized to the new culture, enabled her extended interactions with others. By the end of the year, she had become a “competent community member” (p. 54), insofar as being able to interact for extended periods using both verbal L2 and non-verbal means. Kultti (2013) studied children with Swedish as a second language at mealtimes in a preschool. The mealtimes provided opportunities for the children to talk and teachers could guide them by asking questions as incentives to speak, usually concerning the subjects around the mealtime itself, but also other topics. Williams (2001) suggests that the routines of Swedish preschools, such as mealtimes, circle times, and play, provide situations for children to participate and act within a set of values, rules, and beliefs promoted by the culture. At the studied preschool, this was done both verbally and non-verbally; as the routines were built around predictable structures, they allowed for peer-learning opportunities through observation and imitation of other children who served as role models for each other.

A tenet of Swedish preschools concern how play is connected to learning and development, a value that is specified within the curricula (Samuelsson, 2019). Early play routines, such as “peek-a-boo” and “hide-and-seek,” give predictable linguistic structures that, according to Ratner and Bruner (1977), may provide scaffolding for children’s language learning. Play also provides an essential social function. Blum-Kulka and Gorbatt (2014) noticed how this interaction between peers learning their L2 could provide opportunities for learning, where more established children can scaffold newcomers in play (cf. Lave & Wenger, 1991). Comparably, Björk-Willén and Cromdal (2009) observed how second-language learning children acted out educational routines that followed a circle time structure within their “free play” activities, where children used educational routines as models (e.g., adopting the roles of teacher and pupil), following the I-R-E structure. The observed children made use of non-verbal actions and their first languages during these events. Ervin-Tripp’s (1986) study of second language children in U.S. schools illustrated how the structured routines provide a scaffold for children, which they were later able to portray in their play both in and out of school. In such play sessions, the children could pretend to “be on the phone” or “be the teacher” by using schemas of the routine activities. The children played through these sessions, even if their L2 vocabulary was abbreviated, by using the structure of activities, gestures, and imitations of their peers. However, Björk-Willén (2008) observed routines such as circle time at a multilingual preschool, and through fine-grained interactional analysis saw how even small deviations from the expected routine might present difficulties for second language learning children, describing them as a “contingently sensitive practice” (573), which could nevertheless be repaired through the teacher’s engagement. It is also possible, as Björk-Willén (2008) remarks, that such repairs might themselves provide learning opportunities. While this activity retains some interactional similarities with instructional activities (c.f. Stoewer & Musk, 2018), it should be stated here that the circle time observed in this study is mostly done in a more playful style. Interestingly, the interactional styles of circle time have been observed to be recruited into children’s play sessions (Cekaite & Aronsson, 2005). Cekaite and Aronsson’s (2004, 2005) studies verify that joking about language and playful language use (e.g., playfully using repetitions) might generate language learning opportunities, as they primarily build on some level of metalinguistic awareness and, crucially, are used by children both in and out of the classroom.

Following the research on balanced childhood settings, this article adds to the literature about how preschool environments can add structure for children’s participation in their emerging second language. Moreover, the article analytically engages in empirical examples of how this is specifically afforded by preschool environments, routines, and children’s playful engagement. The article can add insights into how this might provide an arena for interaction supportive of children’s emergent second language use and development.

Theoretical framework: Imitation, routines, and second-language development

This article uses a theoretical framework from cultural psychology, where cultural learning through imitation is a fundamental concept (cf. Tomasello, 1999). Imitation is understood by Vygotsky (1978) as different from a simple copying act of mimicry. Instead, it is understood as being based on the human capacity to understand the intentions behind others’ utterances and their placement in goal-oriented activities, which is of fundamental importance for language learning (Tomasello, 2003) and second-language development (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006). The children in this article are at the stage of emergently using their L2 and display many of the non-verbal behaviors associated with this stage (cf. Tabors, 1997). Cultural learning is, in this sense, a result of embodied participation, and the children use non-verbal means such as pointing, gazing, requesting, and imitating behaviors common for children developing a new language (Tabors, 1997; Tomasello, 2003). Moreover, these interactional encounters may provide scaffolding in themselves, as they take place within conventions for conversation, such as how turns are distributed in interaction and expectations of hand-raising and waiting for one’s turn to speak (e.g., Mehan, 1979).

Cultural learning in a new setting is crucially founded on some human abilities and features of the cultural environment in which it takes place. Language learning and development in part relies on the human pattern-finding aptitude, and that language is built-up in a patterned way and, in this sense, imitable (Tomasello, 1999). Language, as used, is often formulaic in its character, such as common phrases that are repeated in everyday life (e.g., Wray, 2002). In this way, participation in the repeated events of a sociocultural community might offer possibilities for children to understand words, their meanings, and linguistic functions from encountering them being used (Nelson, 2007).

Imitation is not only restricted to words and phrases, but also can extend to the ability to read the intention of human movement and behaviors in context. In this way, language learning is intertwined with learning the behaviors of cultural activities and practices (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006). Imitation is thus an act embedded within a cultural practice that may carry rules and routines, and can be a part of a cultural “schema” (Shore, 1996) or “scripted activity” (Cole, 1996). Cultural activities are understood as patterned ways of conduct that includes not only behaviors, but also words, language use, and material artifacts as parts of the environment in which they take place (cf. Cole, 1996; Shore, 1996). Knowledge of such schemas can provide a scaffold to support children as they act and play in their second language (Ervin-Tripp, 1986). Cultural activities can in this sense be said to contain a set of what Ramstead et al. (2016) call “cultural affordances” that are related to by children through the “immersive involvement of agents in patterned cultural practices” (p. 8) and provide children with opportunities for action within a cultural setting. Through participation in patterned or scripted activities, children’s attention can be guided to the environment’s most meaningful affordances. In terms of this article, children can be seen to approach these affordances through embodied participation in settings, and that guided attention to the imitable patterns provides scaffolding for children’s participation, language use, and development.

Thus, L2 development is set within a cultural environment imbued with meaningful affordances around which the children interact. The scripted and routine nature of how this is enacted within preschool provides children with potential scaffolding structures to emergently use their L2. Language development in this sense is a notion of iterated social interaction in cultural settings; moreover, it is argued that the embodied character of children’s participation in preschool is specifically suited for this. This article argues that the character of play is central to why this is important.

Following Vygotsky’s (1978) notion of play, children may use the cultural patterns from other activities and play with them in ways that, according to Van Oers (2013), allow increased degrees of freedom relative to other forms of cultural activities. Thus, children can test their emerging understanding of the cultural world around them and the language associated with it. Play might in this way be an activity whereby newcomer children can put into practice their understanding of new cultural affordances and discover their limits in a “risk-free” way with their peers. Not only do children in play extract the internal affordances of objects and play with them, as Tomasello (1999) observes, this play also relies on an understanding of cultural affordances of objects in their environment and may include an understanding of the cultural scripts in which the interactions take place. In preschool, play is sometimes led by adults, in the form of what Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Berk, and Singer (2008) call “guided play” through which teachers may exploit the properties of play to enable scaffolding interactions into the language and cultural routines represented in the preschool routines and environments.

For the child, “play is one of the aspects of any activity (like imagination in respect to thought)” (Piaget, 1951/1999, p. 147), and should be seen as a continuity from the cultural activities in which children participate. In playful activity, the affordances of cultural roles, scenes, and settings can be acted out through embodied means as a preparation for participation on the verge of the child’s emergent linguistic means.

Methods

The overarching method used in this article is a qualitative synthesis (cf. Sandelowski & Barroso, 2007) of data from two of the author’s ethnographic case studies.¹ One of the studies tracked a class of preschool children (n = 21), ages 4–5 years old, over 8 weeks, collecting data from both formal activities and spontaneous play. The second was a case study of two newcomer children who were shadowed (cf. Czarniawska, 2007) for three days at their preschool, with added ethnographic fieldwork. Both studies have purposively selected children and preschools based on location and the high number of bi- or multilingual children enrolled in the preschools. By their respective aims of studying children’s communication during activity, the studies have used several methods of data collection through video, photography, audio recordings from mobile devices, and field notes. The projects accumulated rich sets of data from the children’s formal and spontaneous activities and interactions set within the preschool environments. These data collection methods have taken the preschool child’s various means of communication into account and can, by and large, be placed within the realms of visual or sensory ethnography (cf. Pink, 2015) through a synthesis of the multimodal data (c.f. Jewitt, Bezemer, & O’Halloran, 2016). This methodological approach responds to the aim of this study, allowing the capturing of embodied participation, or when children use emerging language and embodied means of communication to participate in preschool activities.

The data sets of the separate studies were inductively coded by the researcher for types of activities. Through this, common and divergent activities at the preschools were found. Here a common pattern of activities, several shared with the Williams (2001) study, was thematically distinguished: circle time, mealtime, play, rest time, outdoor activities, and care routines.

Based on the coding, three types of common activities, which also are recurring in other early childhood settings were chosen for this article: circle time, mealtime, and play or, specifically, socio-dramatic pretend play. These activities are similar to other descriptions of Swedish preschools (e.g., Williams, 2001), thus providing some external reliability. Circle time was chosen because of its commonality and its preparatory function for later schooling (i.e., “school-readiness”; cf. Bustamante et al., 2018; Chien et al., 2010). Mealtime is another everyday activity, but it has connections to other spheres of the child’s life outside of school. Play activities have been sampled to show how they can build on the structures from the former sampled activities, as predicted by the theoretical framework (cf. Piaget, 1951/1999; Vygotsky, 1978) and empirical studies (cf. Björk-Willén & Cromdal, 2009; Ervin-Tripp, 1986).

The synthetic approach can be used to find commonalities across ethnographic cases (Sandelowski & Barroso, 2007). For this study’s purposes, it has been used to gather which routines and environments seem to be recurring among preschools and to understand which common cultural affordances children can encounter when participating in them. Many of the routines appear across preschools in Sweden (e.g., Williams, 2001), and the intra-study cases contain details of the environments that share common markers as shown through the coding and the thematically occurring activities that appeared. As suggested by Sandelowski and Barroso (2007), qualitative synthesis can be used to confirm the studies’ validity, through the intra-study comparability between cases – here, the two preschools.

The commonalities of routines and environments are distilled and explained in the results with regard to what cultural affordances they provide for children. These are descriptions at the activity level that show some general markers of what the activities provide in terms of cultural affordances for L2 participation. Moreover, the study adds an interactional level of analysis, where examples are given for how these cultural affordances can be used in the actual interaction at the preschools. All the analyzed routines are provided with examples of children’s embodied participation. These examples have been purposefully sampled to showcase typical interaction within the coded activity types.

For the interaction analysis, a model of transcription and analysis inspired by Jordan and Henderson (1995) has been used to capture both verbal and non-verbal interaction (for transcription key, see Appendix). This model allowed different kinds of data – video, audio, photo, and field-notes – to be merged, by the model where actors and verbal and non-verbal actions are separated into separate columns. This allowed both visual and nonvisual data to be used in transcription and for the sample provided in this article, following the methodological need of synthesizing different forms of data. The style of transcription from Jordan and Henderson (1995) also enabled highlighting how verbal and non-verbal actions are instances of embodied participation, as separated in columns, which allows the analysis to show how these modes of communication are interrelated.

Results

The results are divided into the three types of activities: circle time, mealtime, and play. In each respective main section, the general affordances for the type of activity are presented (cf. Cole, 1996; Ramstead et al., 2016), as well as what they might provide for children’s learning and L2 development. To this main analytical points of the sample are stated to aid analytical clarity. Secondly, for each type of activity, one or two samples of interaction are provided. Here, the affordances provide opportunities for language learning that can be taken up in interaction. It will be shown how certain types of interaction, such as classroom-style (cf. Mehan, 1979), repetitions (cf. Cekaite & Aronsson, 2004), or playful use of language (cf. Cekaite & Aronsson, 2005) can provide particular interactional possibilities to scaffold second language use and development. It is then suggested that the language and cultural knowledge gathered is used in children’s play (cf. Ervin-Tripp, 1986).

Circle time or the assembly

Swedish preschools have had a long tradition of daily “circle time” or “assembly” (Swedish: “samling,” literally “gathering”). The circle time carries a strong tradition and is routinely practiced today in many preschools in one form or another. In this activity, children are seated in a circle together with a teacher, so he/she can direct comments to one, or all, of the children, via face-to-face interaction (see Figure 1). The content of circle time varies between preschools, as organization of the age groups. Singing of children’s songs is observed across all age groups, however, starting from the youngest (1;0 years) participants, who can “chime in” (Rogoff, 2003) to the singing and the gestural movements that often accompany the songs. Many songs have an almost canonical status and are sung in preschools (and preparatory preschools for children <1;0 years) and are often older traditional children’s songs that are sometimes modernized or “remixed” locally.²

Figure 1. A typically structured circle-time. The teacher is reading aloud and children are sitting around the teacher, a structure also symbolized by the round mat in the room affording community and possible face-to-face interaction with all attendant children

In older age groups, children’s songs might still be a daily theme. However, more time is spent on longer narratives, through activities, such as reading or storytelling, and on the children’s personal narratives, for example, the retelling of past and present events. One of the studied preschools routinely asked the children, one by one, during Friday’s circle time, what they planned to do over the weekend, and, having returned on Monday, what they did over the weekend. For the older age groups at one preschool, it is also more common to talk about events at the preschool, such as the weekly excursion to the woods.

What the circle time affords is a direct interaction between teacher and children. Properties of typical I-R-E interactions (cf. Mehan, 1979) can be detected and are often tilted to a more formal playful type of interaction. The teacher may direct the interaction toward the whole group or interact with individual children, depending on the type of activity. For instance, singing would require the whole group’s attention and having a child re-tell an event would require a face-to-face session for an individual scaffolding interaction. The first two examples of this results section will showcase how types of interaction may unfold during circle time.

Example 1: Early encounters with circle time

In this example (Figure 2), we look at one of the most fundamental ways in which circle time is used, namely for the function of having the children call out to confirm their attendance. This example illustrates two points relevant to this article. First, Li Na (4;0 years, Mandarin L1) is a newly arrived child who is still getting used to the preschool routines and the Swedish language. The other point is that it strongly illustrates what may happen when one child, Ibrahim (4;5 years, Somali L1), diverges from the cultural script. The example is illustrative of how structurally rigid circle time can be, and how this structure is both enabling and limiting.

Figure 2. An example of attendance-taking during circle time

The children are sitting in a circle around the teacher. She is taking the children’s attendance by checking off a list of the children’s names, a routine that opens the morning circle time every day. The preschool teacher (Teacher1) is calling out the names, with an assistant teacher (Teacher2) sitting beside the circle of children.

This routine is heavily scripted. Each day, the teacher calls out the names of the children from the register. Each child calls out “Here” (Swedish: “Här”), in response to hearing their name called, and then that child’s attendance is marked on the register. We note Ibrahim responding at line 1–2, following the correct structure. However, he continues to say “Here” as Selma’s name is called out (line 3–5), echoing her response. As Teacher1 announces Dejan’s name, Ibrahim continues this behavior (line 6–8). At this point, Teacher2 challenges Ibrahim, and, in reprimanding him, she explicitly explains, “You cannot sit there and say ‘here’ for somebody else Ibrahim (.) only yourself” (line 9). In this way, she is enforcing the script of registering attendance and explicitly explains the rules for this. Next, when the name of the newcomer child, Li Na, is called out, the standard structure is recovered, and Li Na can undisturbedly confirm her attendance without interference (line 10–11).

For now, we ignore that this is probably an example of the low linguistic quality of circle time that Bustamante et al. (2018) has evaluated. This example, however, also shows how clearly scripted some activities at preschool are, essentially being enforced by a reprimand if deviated from, as in the case with Ibrahim. The structure is almost as simple as a conversational structure can be, where “Here” as a response to hearing one’s name called out is sufficient. The routine is nonetheless a foundation and will follow the children throughout their years of schooling. In this way, this cultural script (cf. Cole, 1996; Shore, 1996) begins a day in the schooling system and shows that a child is attending and punctual. This example encapsulates both stages of participation as observed by Cekaite (2007). Li Na participates in the early stage with short words, Ibrahim participates in the second stage as he starts to play with the routines and is thus considered disobedient. It may be argued that the language learning opportunities in scenes like this are limited. Simultaneously, they provide a foundation structure for participation with its rigid structure, and thus are an example of the important daily rituals (Blum-Kulka & Gorbatt, 2014), as children can fully participate with only a gesture and a word (e.g., raising one’s hand and saying “here”). It also can be viewed as a form of early participation in the school system, considering how this interactional structure is standard across educational settings and stages.

Example 2: Elaboration in the later ages

This episode presents a group of children who are, on average, older than the children in Example 1. Here, more advanced tasks are conducted during circle time, as several of these children will start school the following year. Figure 3, features two children: Lucas (4;0) and Alfredo (4;9, Spanish L1, Swedish L2). The children have returned from their weekly visit to the forest and have then been asked to paint what they would like to include in a play about the forest. Some of the children display imaginative paintings about knights, princesses. and dragons, addressing classic themes about good and evil, while some are more spontaneously painted.

Figure 3. Circle time about children’s drawings based on an outdoor visit to the woods

In the episode in Figure 3 we see an excerpt of children’s participation in circle time, even if it is with few verbal means as in the case of Alfredo (4;10 years, Spanish L1) or adding a theme as with Lucas (4;10 years), and how these are taken up as contributions to the circle time agenda by the teacher. The example is less rigid in its circle time script than Example 1 and thus expands the notion of what circle time might contain.

Lucas is the painter of the first work to be picked from the pile by the teacher. The teacher calls the attention of the children to Lucas by asking him to show his painting “so everyone can see” (line 1). This immediately piques another child’s interest – “What is that?” (line 2). As this child is sitting on the opposite side of the circle from Lucas, they must work out which detail the child is asking about. Lucas does this by using deictic gesturing, pointing and asking, “This one?” The child who is asking does not rebut the question, and as such Lucas goes on to say, “Those are rocks” (line 3). Lucas then starts identifying other details in the painting. All of this is within the frame of these details and becomes potential objects in the upcoming play. To this theme, he adds, “Here is a knight and here is a dragon” (line 4). Later, Alfredo’s painting is picked. He is a child with Swedish L2 and is quite talkative. The teacher initiates the discussion, asking, “What have you done Alfredo?” (line 5). This type of open question allows for a comprehensive answer. Alfredo’s work is of a large and bright object, and he offers a concise and grammatically correct³ answer – “A sun” (line 6). This response, could, of course, be prompted with follow-up questions. Instead, the teacher chooses to incorporate Alfredo’s utterance into a more extended response, explaining that this sun will be incorporated into the upcoming play (line 7).

This example is grounded in that the children first have visited the forest, where the teacher talked with them about their observations and let them imagine a possible play based in that setting. While appealing to the creative side of children, circle time here provides a structure where the children, with a relatively formulaic response (‘a/an X’), might add to the task. In this way, a simple structure is provided that allows children of different language proficiencies to contribute to the conversation, with the circle time perhaps providing a scaffold for participation.

The example shows a contrast, compared to Example 1, of what activities become part of circle time and includes some “linguistic richness” (cf. Bustamante et al., 2018). We might, however, question what sort of stimulation this short interaction affords L2 learning, as the L2 child of this example is prompted with few follow-up questions. Example 2 allows a looser structure than the taking of the register in Example 1. However, it is still within the relative bounds of a classroom-style interaction (cf. Mehan, 1979). Although there are some affordances for participation for L2 children in circle time, there is also a limited time for dialogue with every child. One might here ask what the limits of instructional style interaction are for the child developing L2 in preschool (cf. Bonawitz et al., 2011), and we turn to more informal and spontaneous types of interaction next.

Mealtime

Mealtimes are based around three main meals during the day – breakfast, lunch, and an afternoon snack – with smaller snacks in between at times. The meals at the observed preschools are characteristically a highly structured activity. Seating is predetermined, identified either by name tags on the chairs or a seating chart on the wall, where children can see their names and pictures on the chart that correspond with a chair in the dining room. The food menus have some variation with many recurring dishes, thus making sentence structure predictable, for example: “pasta with X” (Swedish: “pasta med X”), “rice with Y” (Swedish: “ris med Y”). The menu also consists of Swedish classics, such as meatballs (Swedish: “köttbullar”) and the traditional lunch on Thursdays of soup with pancakes (Swedish: “soppa med pannkaka”). The recurring structure of the menu is of importance, as mealtimes are then more predictable on a weekly and daily basis. With a few formulaic expressions, the children can recognize and talk about the food being served. Sometimes, as documented in the field-notes, a child will be selected to help collect the food from the kitchen and hand it out to the rest of the group. Since this task will also be assigned to the newcomer children, the predictability may aid them as a scaffold for completing such an exercise.

To further exemplify the routinization of mealtimes at preschools in Sweden, it should be noted that both the observed preschools use a familiar chant, “Hands on knees, food on the table, now we are ready, so please do begin.” This chant begins the meal and is usually followed by the food being presented at the table. The food is usually served in deep dishes; for example, meatballs with mashed potatoes (Swedish: “köttbullar med potatismos”) would be divided into the separate elements of meatballs and mashed potatoes. This arrangement thus affords the potential for teachers to point to one food and establish if a child does not know the word for it. It also functions as a form of informal language learning game, by asking a child for a specific food when they have several options within reach – “Could you pass me the meatballs, please?” (Swedish: “Kan du skicka köttbullarna, tack?”) – allowing an informal “correction” to be made if the child reaches for the wrong item and feedback through modification if the child uses the wrong word for the item.

In this way, as also noted by Kultti (2013), the mealtimes afford opportunities for L2 use, insofar as being able to point to objects and name them deictically. The objects that are laid out in this manner are in this sense cultural affordances that children can perceive in their context, having them named by their social interlocutors, and progressively build an understanding of their function within the culturally scripted activity of eating a meal together.

Example 3: Food, words, and opportunities for imitation

This example details the points about the affordances of the preschool mealtime raised above. Here, we return to the newcomer child Li Na, from Example 1, showcasing how the mealtime scenario of eating fish with potatoes (Swedish: “fisk med potatis”) provides opportunities for early L2 use.

The example displays how the environment provides affordances for spontaneous language use through deictically available items (i.e., food in separate bowls). Several affordances here promote the children’s embodied participation (the low table and chairs, the small bowls each with an individual food item), making them suitable for this stage of emergent L2 use (cf. Tabors, 1997), by being available for pointing, reaching to, grabbing, or naming.

In Figure 4, Li Na is sitting at a lunch table together with her teacher and three other children. The teacher is sitting next to Li Na at the side of the table, a placement that affords direct and close interaction with this child. Today’s menu includes fish, potato, and a sauce. Each item is placed in a separate deep dish or bowl, and children have been served unpeeled potatoes on their plates.

Figure 4. Mealtime, where child and teacher are interacting about the served food

This episode begins with the typical scene of an adult, the teacher, obtaining the child’s, Li Na, attention by calling her name, pointing and saying the name of an object, the fried fish (line 1), and Li Na responing with a repetition of the object’s name (line 2).

The teacher then says, “First peel the potato,” and mimes the act of peeling a potato for the children at the table (line 3). As Li Na carries out this fine motor activity, copying the mime, she is complimented by her teacher – “Good, Li Na” (line 4–5). A compliment that is responded to with a playful repetition, and abbreviation, of the word “potato” (Swedish: “potatis”) as “tatis” (line 6). This style of interaction continues when the teacher instructs the children to split their potatoes into bite-sized pieces (line 7). Li Na then calls out “potati potatis” as the potato is cut into two.

This episode has displayed a variation of a fundamental scene of child language learning, as adults and children jointly attend and point to objects and name them in so-called “triadic interaction” (cf. Tomasello, 2003). The cultural affordances of this scene are exploitable, as the container with fish, placed on the table in front of the children, makes this scene ideal for this type of interaction. The weekly menu varies, but fish will be served at least once a week. This word is thus repeated over time, and here it is repeated within the episode, making it accessible for imitation. The same applies to potato, where the custom is to peel the potato at the table. This presents an opportunity for Li Na to, seemingly, joyfully play with the word – “tatis,” “potati,” “potatis” – it cannot be ignored that this type of language repetition game might serve an important function here, also noticed by Cekaite and Aronsson (2004), as a form of phonetic play with the word. Scenes like this afford possibilities for children to learn the commonly used words of the cultural community while participating in everyday tasks. They are anchored in the deictically present objects and can easily be named by a more experienced interlocutor, affording word-learning opportunities. Moreover, besides learning basic words and phrases, the scene affords cultural learning as it promotes a behavioral repertoire common to mealtimes. Embodied participation thus affords learning in a double sense – both as being a way to approach a new language (by pointing, requesting etc.), and also as a way to engage and develop culturally appropriate behaviors.

Play

Play comes in various forms at the preschools. As noted at both observed preschools, only a few hours per week are scheduled for instructional activities. Although it varies depending on when in the calendar year the schedule is sampled,⁴ or if there are any ongoing projects, a substantial amount of time is dedicated to children’s play activities.

Following the time allowed for play in the preschools’ everyday structure, time for so-called “free-play” is given an important role at the observed Swedish preschools. So we turn our attention to the environmental design of a preschool, in which such play interactions are located. Both preschools supply children with artifacts for construction, drawing and writing, role-playing, etc. The various play activities and their affordances for L2 learning are too vast to fully explore here (see Ledin & Samuelsson, 2017, for more).

There are specific playrooms at the preschools for children. Both preschools provide generous materials for the children to initiate play within a shop and household frame. The preschools provide one or more rooms designed for household role-playing with a child-sized stove, table, and cutlery, essentially replicating a dining area with toys. The preschools also provide shopfronts and cash registers so that the children can complete cycles of the household script of shopping, preparing and eating food together (or, costumes for role-playing, see Figure 5).

Figure 5. Boys dressing for pretend socio-imaginative play of police, with one boy dressed as an officer and the other as a detection dog

These environmental designs rely on the same fundamental principle, where cultural affordances (cf. Ramstead et al., 2016) and their patterns are used. The use of cultural affordances allow children to take parts from other spheres of preschool (and indeed also other areas of life), making it possible to play with these common artifacts from the cultural practices the children encounter and to use them in alignment with their understanding of the cultural scripts from which the play session originates. Here, it will be exemplified by two variants, one from children’s free play and one from guided play with teachers.

Example 4: Guided play of a mealtime

The following example shows how a teacher can employ guided play for pedagogical purposes. It features the newcomer child, Li Na, present in Example 1 and 3. Here, the child and teacher are acting out a mealtime in the playroom designed to mimic the household environment. In accordance with the cultural affordances explored in the previous example, the teacher uses the guided play session to point out everyday objects, which one would expect to find in a dinner scene, and ask Li Na about them.

A significant point in this example is that it shows how the preschool’s setup of an environment, with toys and objects of a particular cultural script, is primed for embodied participation. Children may use the toy replicas of foods and cutlery to play mealtime, and emergently use their L2 together with an adult.

Figure 6 features a child-sized table in the preschool household area. This area is filled with household items, and child-sized stoves, storefronts etc. and thus affords, play under this theme. The teacher has joined the children in play; she is sitting at an almost set table, and is now requesting the remaining items from the children.

Figure 6. Playing a mealtime, guided by the teacher

The scene begins with confusion. The teacher is leading a game where Li Na is asked to fetch requested items to the table. When the teacher gains Li Na’s attention, she asks for a fork (Swedish: “gaffel”). Since this word closely resembles the word coffee (Swedish: “kaffe”) as it is pronounced in speech, it is either misheard by Li Na or understood as ‘”coffee” since Li Na has not acquired the word “gaffel” (line 1). When Li Na responds, “Yeah (.) coffee” (line 2), the teacher tries to correct this, saying “Fork (.) like doing this,” while cutting her imagined food in the space over the plate, “Fork (.) and knife” (line 3–4).

This pattern continues when Li Na instead picks up a jar (line 5), and the teacher must correct her action by saying, “No, that is a jar” (line 6). Another child, Anna, is watching this play interaction from the other side of the table and tries to rescue the situation by showing Li Na a fork and knife, “Here I have a fork (.) and knife” (line 7). The teacher once again points this out by deictically gesturing toward the fork and knife, directing Li Na’s attention and repeating the words (line 8).

The example, in many ways, resembles the mealtime we saw in the previous section. It is based around the same type of script (cf. Cole, 1996; Shore, 1996), arranged and afforded by the various objects, such as plates, knives, and forks. However, a fundamental difference, other than that most of the objects are toy replicas, is how this play activity allows a broader degree of freedom (cf. Van Oers, 2013) compared to the actual mealtime. Thus, it affords a playful language learning game during which the teacher can ask for various items in this room, and this situation can change from coffee time to mealtime. It also allows a form of play with the cultural scripts’ limits, as when the coffee is available; it is not appropriate in this type of mealtime script, as it would be in a coffee-drinking script. The environment also provides opportunities for meaningful peer interaction, where a child with Swedish as L1 helps the newcomer L2 peer, a scene also observed by Blum-Kulka and Gorbatt (2014). These type of possibilities for cultural learning would not be possible at the traditionally set table. They are afforded by the preschool environment and explored through children’s embodied participation in it. However, besides this possibility, it also adds complexity as the activity becomes less based on the script. Nonetheless, play within the relative bounds of a scripted activity offers possibilities for play interaction, as we will see next.

Example 5: Pretend-playing a shop transaction

The following example, as seen in Figure 7, will showcase and expand some core points about play that are examined in this article. In this example, two boys, Simon (4;1 years, English L1, Swedish L2, Tagalog L3) and David (4;11 years, Swedish L1) are playing shop in the area dedicated to playing shop and household themes. Since this is time for “free play,” the children are free to organize their own play. We will, however, see that the boys make full use of the affordances provided for playing shop, in this case even the environmentally suggested scene of buying ice cream (Swedish: “glass”) as literally suggested on the shop front (see the right-hand image in Figure 7).

Figure 7. To the left: A boy, Simon, is preparing the cash register with replicas of the Swedish krona bills. To the right: A friend, David, is coming to shop ice-cream (Swedish: “glass”) as written and drawn on the storefront

This example points out how children can elaboratively play, based on a cultural script of “shop,” and how the environment provides affordances that support this. Thus, the example provides a pinnacle of embodied participation as children enact a fully functional scene, in concert with the environment. This is a scene that indeed contains the relevant aspects and details of a normal ice-cream store transaction. The example also points to how peer play within cultural environments of the preschool can support sustained play between children of different language proficiencies.

In Figure 8, Simon (4;1 years) and David (4;11 years) are playing store. Simon has prepared the store beforehand, filling the cash register with replica bills. The boys are then taking turns to shop and run the store. In this episode, David is running the store and Simon is coming to shop.

Figure 8. Two boys are playing store in the room designed for store play at the preschool

Simon has run into a problem. Since he prepared the store, the bills are now contained in the cash register and he does not have any banknotes. He has to start this play session by requesting that David, who’s playing the cashier, give him some money – “Can you give me cash (.) you have to give me cash” (line 1). Fortunately, David immediately grasps Simon’s intention and hands him a banknote (line 2). As Simon takes the note and turns away (line 3), David resumes the script by saying, “Then you should give it to me” (line 4). Simon follows along and turns back (line 5); David says, “Then you get that,” and helps Simon hand over the banknote (line 6). As Simon hands over the note, he moves to the side of the counter, as if standing in line, and exclaims, “I want ice cream” (line 8). After a few seconds of impatience, Simon asks, “Is it ready?” (line 9). David grabs a wooden stick lying next to the cash register and hands it over as the imaginary ice cream – “Then you get this from me” (line 10).

The activity is heavily scripted, and it can be reasonably suggested that much can be accomplished here. The environment has a lot to offer this play activity, such as the physical affordances allowing actions: money transactions, a counter to walk to and wait at, and a shop window suggesting ice cream could be bought there. This is supplemented by the cultural affordances of buying ice cream, a relatively straightforward task of a shop transaction where the cultural script can support this interaction.

Interestingly, the sessions of free play are imbued with rules. However, this seems to provide scaffolding for children in play sessions like this. The play is structured around common knowledge of the scripts as situated in the room with artifacts that can support the children to act out their play. This does not become an obstacle when the children diverge from the script, as in the beginning, when the boy playing customer needs money for the play to progress. The artifacts and environment thus aid children’s embodied participation as they provide structure for the play session through being extended means of children’s play. In this case, the children can continue with the same cultural goal in mind. It is not evident here that there is a trilingual child playing, and it could be suggested that activities like this provide a supportive setting for L2 use, by providing a shared cultural scene in miniature, affording the children to try their emerging understanding of the cultural patterns around them.

Discussion

Large-scale studies of children’s outcomes have pointed to the importance of a relatively structured setting for children in the preschool years (e.g., Chien et al., 2010; Fuligni et al., 2012). From the qualitative synthesis of this article, it is shown that the preschool environment, with its routines and participation in these, can provide a supportive structure for children to use their L2. This study has argued and exemplified that this can be achieved through embodied participation, in which children can participate with their emerging linguistic and non-verbal means, and is aided through the cultural scaffolding of preschool activities (c.f. Cole, 1996; Ramstead et al., 2016). The study is limited from drawing hard conclusions of children’s second-language development, but moreover studies the affordances of preschool environments, routines, and interactions that underpin children’s emergent second language use.

One of the studied routines is circle time. From the earliest of preschool experiences, circle time allows children to “chime in” (Rogoff, 2003) with the ongoing communal conversation or group singing at their level of proficiency. It follows a clear pattern, where children at the same time each day are seated in a circle, attendance is registered, and the fundamental rule that children may speak one at a time is followed. This type of cultural script can be understood as a precursor to an interactional pattern that has for a long time been prioritized in school settings (cf. Mehan, 1979; Walldén, 2019), yet nonetheless can be altered and played with (cf. Cekaite, 2007; Cekaite & Aronsson, 2005). The circle time presents an event when the teacher can watch over the whole group of children or go into face-to-face interaction with an individual. The daily iterated attendance-taking (as in Example 1) or singing of familiar songs is highly imitable, which is of importance for second language learning and development (cf. Blum-Kulka & Gorbatt, 2014; Lantolf & Thorne, 2006). One can certainly question the quality of all circle time activities for their content and lack of linguistically challenging tasks, as Bustamante et al. (2018) do. However, in this study, the affordances of circle time also provide a possibility for early embodied participation for children’s emergent L2 use, by filling a socializing function enabling children’s simple participation. On a critical note, it should simultaneously be noted how the interaction between teachers and children developing their L2 remain limited during circle time as compared to other forms of interaction.

Having a meal together is a universal event and provides a basic source of social interaction. In this article, mealtimes have been analyzed for specific cultural affordances. The typical arrangement of the weekly and daily meal structures makes this another highly imitable routine, yet promoting more spontaneous interaction than circle time. It is suggested from the results that mealtimes might permit linguistic opportunities, as sentences and words are repeated throughout the semester (“pasta with x,” “potatoes with y”). This can interactionally unfold, as illustrated in Example 3, with the basic triadic interaction of child–adult–object (cf. Tomasello, 2003) providing a form of language learning session, as teachers uses objects on the table to provide word-learning games similar to those observed by Cekaite and Aronsson (2004) and Kultti (2013). The preschool is here structured for children’s embodied participation, one example being how tables and other tools in the environment are sized so children can seat themselves, point, and ask for objects on the table, etc.

The embodied participation in routines such as circle time and mealtimes can facilitate children’s participation through the support of routinized interaction and environmental affordances that means these events can enable imitation in the second language (cf. Lantolf & Thorne, 2006; Tomasello, 2003). Moreover, routines are set within cultural activities and have meanings within a larger cultural sphere (Cole, 1996). Imitating words and patterns of behavior is therefore set within cultural activities that have fundamental importance in other social settings, where circle time, in Examples 1 and 2, essentially is a precursory school format (cf. Mehan, 1979) that provides an important structure for interaction. In Example 3, this is seen in the communal or familial act of sharing food (cf. Rogoff, 2003). These are types of routines that children will encounter throughout their upbringing (Nelson, 2007), and Cekaite (2007) points out how L2 learning children can gradually become part of such routines, as part of their socialization into the new culture. This article can vouch for their scaffolding potential for L2 use, and, as with Ervin-Tripp (1986), this study explored their potential for second language play.

In agreement with the Vygotsky (1978) notion of play, learning and development of a second language are based on the rules that children take from other cultural activities, and as such also is based on a form of imitation of cultural scripts, words, behaviors, etc. Both the preschools that were studied have child-friendly appropriations of common cultural affordances, in the form of playrooms with household and shop settings, equipped with appropriate artifacts to help children imitate their understanding of the cultural activities in interactions with peers (and teachers in some cases, see Example 4). As shown in Example 5, the setting provides cultural affordances for children to act out a scripted cultural activity, and it allows children to participate with their available means of communication. It seems that a rudimentary understanding of the cultural script of a shop transaction and the common intended goal (of playing “buying ice cream”) is sufficient to complete this play activity. These results are in line with Björk-Willén’s (2008) observation that such difficulties in play interaction might provide learning opportunities through the interactional cues that follow. Another possibility created by this playfulness of children’s encounters with these iterated activities is the opportunity to play with language itself, similarly to the observations made by Cekaite and Aronsson (2005).

Play also allows some freedom in regard to the cultural rules (c.f. Van Oers, 2013), and this aspect supports the notion made by Erving-Tripp (1986) that play activities provide a scaffold for second language use. This is exemplified in the article by how children can engage with cultural routines as providing thematic structure for children’s play, but children can engage within these scripts in ways that allow embodied participation in cases when the interaction would normally break down. Furthermore, this is also provided by the engaged preschool teacher who participates in scaffolding interactions though what Hirsh-Pasek et al. (2008) call guided play. Guided play, in Example 4, blurs the boundaries of play and the normal cultural activity, as this example could very well be an extension of the interactions in the mealtime of Example 3. It, therefore, provides opportunities for teachers to playfully teach children within a scripted activity and, as such, also teach about the cultural activity itself (in Example 4, a fork (Swedish: “gaffel”) fits into the script; however, coffee (Swedish: “kaffe”) does not fit with the pretend meal).

Overall, the article has pointed out different ways that preschools are structured for children’s embodied participation, and that such participation is enabling for children’s emergent L2 use and potential development. These affordances for embodied participation provide essential guidance for children who, often not through choice, find themselves immersed in a new cultural setting, bound to use a new language and to socialize with new peers. Newcomer children arrive in an environment with peers already established in the cultural setting and with teachers who are intended to guide them. This study suggests that the embodied participation of children in these types of settings opens opportunities for communication and provides scaffolding for L2 use and development.

There are indeed limitations to the study, and the foci here of cultural routines should not discount any possible influence of other factors on children’s emergent language use. Thus, the results should be read as open to other sorts of influence. The study is limited to the local culture of the two preschools, and there is no discussion of, among other factors, the differing family settings of the children. One should also be aware of limitations of this locality of the study and that there are indeed other external ecological factors (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 1979), such as how other institutions and policies may be shaping the conditions for these children’s possibilities for cultural learning and language development. Further studies should complement the results and discussion of this article, as this can provide a more full view of the affordances that might support children’s L2 development.

Conclusion

As children find themselves in new and increasingly diverse linguistic settings of today, there is an evident need to know how children go about participating in and learning in these environments. This study has shown some possibilities with regard to the case of Swedish preschools, where some of the environmental structures and social routines in which children interact can provide a space for participation. Through embodied participation and play in the culturally structured settings of the preschools, they become an arena to encounter, use, and potentially develop the new language.

Moreover, the study shows the simultaneous importance of routines and structured days for children in preschool (Chien et al., 2010; Fuligni et al., 2012), and the fundamental importance of play (Ervin-Tripp, 1986; Miller & Almon, 2009). Therefore, this study’s addition to the literature offers empirical examples of balanced settings, allowing both structure, routine activities, and substantial time for “free play.” It empirically points to why this may be important since children play with what they encounter in everyday and imitable routines. As they do this, children try out, and possibly explore, the boundaries of their cultural knowledge and language. This suggests a complex balance between structured routines and spontaneity that ought to be contemplated when shaping early childhood practices. The results nonetheless point to the importance of well-thought-out days for children, that are simultaneously structured and rich in opportunities for play, resulting from the possibly symbiotic relation between these types of activity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For more information, such as methodological and ethical specifications, of these projects, see Ledin and Samuelsson (2017) and Samuelsson (2018).

2. Examples of such songs are the Swedish version of Baa, Baa, Black Sheep (1744, Swedish translation 1892) and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

3. The Swedish language has two definite articles (“en” and “ett”), a matter of confusion for many second-language learners.

4. Some periods during the year are dedicated to, for example, St. Lucia and the Christmas break in December, or summer break during June to August.

Appendix

Transcription key:

(.) – noticeable pause

Underlined rows – simultaneous or interlapping speech

! – exclamatory intonation

? – short rise in intonation suggesting a question