Taking an Interactional Perspective: Examining Children's Talk in the Australian Aboriginal Community of Yakanarra

Abstract

Understanding how children of different ages and different cultures design and organize their talk allows us to better understand how children demonstrate intersubjectivity, how they structure their social world, and how they orient to social and cultural practices. Although researchers are beginning to re-examine interactionally some of the previous observational claims concerning adult Aboriginal conversational style, less focus has been given to Indigenous children's interactional style. Previous observational claims concerning Aboriginal conversational style include increased toleration of silence, increased occurrence of interruptions, reluctance to respond to questions, and the tendency to enter a conversation without attending to the talk of others. One of the aims of the paper is to examine instances of children's interaction against the backdrop of these observations concerning Aboriginal adult conversation style in order to understand how Indigenous children interact with others within the multilingual environment in which they find themselves. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, the paper analyses the talk of two children from Yakanarra in order to show (a) how the children under analysis responded to a request to do something, and the sorts of techniques used to mobilize such a response; and (b) how the children monitored the surrounding adults’ talk occurring within the same interactional space. The analysis, presented against the backdrop of what has been observed to date concerning adult Indigenous conversational style, demonstrates the importance of examining the detail of talk, taking all aspects into account (including prosody, pauses, overlap), in order to understand how two Indigenous children living in Yakanarra interact within their social and cultural worlds.

Keywords:

• Indigenous Children
• Conversation Analysis
• Questions
• Requests
• Conditional Relevance

Notes

¹See also Pomerantz (1984) on pursuing a response.

²What counts as ‘longer’ is measured against normative expectations of adult talk [see Jefferson (1989) for discussion of the 1.0 second metric of silence in talk].

³One of the associated challenges for analysing children's interaction (and one that should not be underemphasized) is that adult analysts are external to the social and cultural world inhabited by children. This is no more evident than in the context of Indigenous children. Yet it is only by beginning to focus on naturally occurring talk-in-interaction, talk that would have occurred anyway, regardless of whether the researcher was there or not, that we can begin to understand the social and cultural context in which Indigenous multilingual children find themselves.

⁴Walsh (1991) makes a distinction between Aboriginal ‘broadcast speech style’ or continuous non-dyadic talk and Anglo white middle class speech style (AWNC) or non-continuous dyadic talk.

⁵The Aboriginal Child Language Project, funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, addresses the type of input children receive in multilingual environments in which there is a traditional language, a contact variety of English and code-mixing between languages and speech styles. See: http://www.linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/research/projects/ACLA/index.html.

⁶Pseudonyms have been used to protect the identity of the participants.

⁷See however Goodwin (1987: 125–126).

⁸It may also be that the coordination demonstrated in these data is purely coincidental. Further analysis of additional data is needed to ascertain whether such coordination is a feature of multiparty talk or whether it is just a feature of this particular interaction.

⁹Erickson (1982), in his analysis of conversational cohesion among Italian-Americans, similarly found that schismed conversations were not independent as participants seemed to pay attention and subtly react across pairs to the parallel conversation.