Using social knowledge while interacting at the classroom sand center: Facework and cohesion strategies

Abstract

The goal of this study is to inform teachers’ practice by identifying specific language strategies that young children use in their play and suggesting ways that teachers can build on our findings to support students’ language and literacy. Deductive analyses of video-recordings of 5-year old children playing at the sand center revealed that children used cohesive strategies, such as repetitions and conjunctions, to tie together the ideas from one speaker to the next, in order to maintain the flow of the play. Children also used facework strategies, such as complimenting peers, softening regulatory language with words such as “just,” and showing interest in others’ activities. These strategies helped children to build relationships with peers and enhance their positive self-esteem as members of the play group. Children used language primarily for imaginative purposes, in addition to communicating information, regulating others’ behavior, and expressing their individuality and emotional responses to activities at the sand center. Primary teachers may find these results useful for guiding assessment of children’s knowledge of and flexibility in using linguistic and semiotic resources to achieve social purposes and to create cohesive narratives in informal interactions.

Keywords

cohesion facework strategies language purposes sand play social knowledge verbal and nonverbal communication young children

“You get the purple one because you’re the mom, right?,” 5-year old Leah tells her peer during dramatic play in a northern rural Canadian kindergarten classroom. The tag question, “right?” softens the sense of being “bossy” as Leah assigns forks to peers. At the other end of the table, Jean Paul says, “And a salad,” using a conjunction to create a flow of ideas in the imaginary play session. The children’s use of language reflects social understandings that have been constructed through everyday interactions with family, classroom, and community members. Although language is not the only semiotic tool available to children, it is a particularly important one for achieving social intentions and fulfilling personal needs in a wide range of social contexts (Boyd and Galda, 2011); Leah’s use of language and other semiotic material for positive social value is a demonstration of facework (Arundale, 2006; Bargiela-Chiappini, 2003; Brown and Levinson, 1987; Shimanoff, 1988), while Jean Paul’s contribution to meaning-making through maintaining a flow of ideas in conversation demonstrates cohesion (Halliday and Hasan, 1976). As reported in this article, our examination of children’s interactions with peers and their teacher at the sand center in this kindergarten classroom shows that children develop a repertoire of facework and cohesion strategies for carrying out this social work at a very young age.

Classroom teachers value oral language and other communication modes as communicative tools and as foundational to literacy and all learning (Resnick and Snow, 2009; Vygotsky, 1978), but are uncertain as to what they could be noticing about children’s language to inform their teaching (Peterson et al., 2016). This was the starting point for a 6-year collaborative action research project involving an ongoing cycle of initiation, reflection, and refinement of pedagogical and assessment approaches. Teachers’ action research initiatives involved setting up dramatic play and other types of play contexts in their classrooms. Teachers’ videos recorded children’s interactions and together informally analyzed the videos during research visits every 6–8 weeks. Activities were based on a view that analyzing children’s talk during play provides a window into children’s knowledge of what they can do with language, their knowledge of language and language forms, and their cultural awareness of ways of interacting with others (Owocki and Goodman, 2002; Portier and Peterson, 2017).

We are a former teacher and now researcher with expertise in literacy education, and a doctoral student with expertise in linguistics. In our branch of the action research project, we analyzed the video-recorded interactions using these questions:

What purposes are achieved in children’s and their teacher’s talk at the sand center?

What facework strategies do children and their teacher employ in these interactions at the sand center?

How do children use cohesive devices to maintain a flow of meaning-making in these interactions?

In this article, we review the literature showing the important contributions of play to children’s language and learning, as well as the few studies we have found examining the purposes of children’s language and their use of facework and cohesion strategies. Following a description of our research methods, we present examples of these linguistic features from video data and propose ways in which our findings might inform teachers’ support of their students’ language and literacy.

Literature review

Our study builds on a body of research, conducted across many decades, showing that play is foundational to children’s conceptual and social learning and to their language and literacy development (e.g. Bodrova and Leong, 2011; Hill, 2016; Whitehead, 2009). Children make sense of their experiences, engaging in problem-solving and using their imaginations to make novel connections between the familiar and new (Whitebread, 2010). Play also provides abundant opportunities for the authentic talk espoused by researchers as being important to all learning (e.g. Barnes, 1992 [1975]; Boyd and Galda, 2011). Authentic talk, which we define as the language, gestures, gaze, and facial expressions that are a part of everyday interactions carried out in real-life contexts, are contrasted with the kinds of talk that researchers have observed in many classrooms around the world (Cazden, 1988/2001; Radford et al., 2011). These researchers describe typical classroom talk as being led by the teacher, who initiates the dialogue by requesting responses from children and then commenting or reflecting on those responses. In these typical classroom interactions, children use language for a limited range of purposes. In the following sections, we provide definitions and synthesize research examining children’s language in terms of the three elements of our research: purposes of language, cohesion, and facework.

Purposes of language

Language (and the nonverbal communication that accompanies language) are “a rich and adaptable instrument for the realization of [a child’s] intentions; there is hardly any limit to what he can do with it” (Halliday, 1969: 27). Children use language to carry out a range of social purposes (e.g. to persuade, develop/support relationships with others, entertain).

In early research examining purposes of language in children’s dramatic play (Smilansky, 1968), children took up a role or changed identities, assigned a role to an object (e.g. a pencil is assigned a role as a worm), described actions and situations while in role, and moved the imagined play situation forward (e.g. “I’m going to pick you up on my snowmobile”). Almost a decade later, Tough (1976) classified the social purposes of 4 to 7-year-old children’s talk in dramatic and construction play settings as self-maintaining, directing others’ behavior, reporting on present and past experiences, moving toward logical reasoning, predicting, projecting, and imagining.

The most recent research of which we are aware is tied to other branches of our collaborative action research project (Peterson et al., 2018), where we found that in their dramatic and construction play, 78 five- and six-year old Indigenous and non-Indigenous children most frequently used language for learning and for imagining (e.g. to give information about, explain, or elaborate on something, or to assign roles to an object/themselves/peers in the imaginary play). In a follow-up project, participating Indigenous children often used nonverbal modes exclusively to achieve their social intentions. We found greater evidence of verbal and nonverbal interactions in dramatic play than in construction/materials play contexts. These two studies provide a foundation for the current analysis of children’s verbal and nonverbal communication at the sand center, with a new focus on cohesion and facework strategies, which are elaborated in the following.

Cohesion

Cohesive ties are used to illustrate the relationship between sentences as well as ideas, supporting the “forward motion” of a conversation. According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), cohesion is necessary for meaning-making in writing and in speech. It is achieved through the use of cohesive ties, such as reference, repetition, substitution, and conjunction. Reference usually involves the use of pronouns to refer backward (anaphoric usage) or forward (cataphoric usage) to nouns in a flow of conversation. Repetition of words and phrases may serve to connect ideas in a flow of conversation, rather than simply being a restatement of something previously uttered (Brody, 1986). Substitution through the use of words, such as one, some, or any, signals a relationship between linguistic items. Conjunction establishes a semantic connection between utterances. Lexical cohesion refers to how words are selected and linked together to create meaning in text. The word can be repeated or take the form of a synonym.

Previous research examining young children’s use of cohesive elements in play narratives was conducted many decades ago. In these studies, researchers found that older children’s narratives were more comprehensible than those of younger children because of the increase in number and type of cohesive devices used (Peterson and Dodsworth, 1991). Pellegrini’s (1982) analysis of four preschoolers’ interactions during dramatic and constructive play showed that children used repetition of introductory utterances to start new play sessions in both contexts. Repetition was used to clarify the topic or theme of the play session in dramatic play but not in constructive play. The children used pronouns to refer to past or future actions/objects in dramatic play and referred to objects and actions outside the play context in their constructive play.

Face and facework

The notion of “face” is drawn from Goffman’s (1967) politeness theory, in which it is defined as “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact” (p. 5). When carrying out facework, the children in our study drew on sociocultural meanings learned in interactions with others, projecting images of the self, intertwined with their assumptions about others. Facework strategies may involve language, action, gaze, gestures, and other nonverbal communication used for purposes such as making others feel comfortable carrying out one’s wishes.

Brown and Levinson’s (1987) notion of a self-image that consists of a positive and negative face informed our analysis of children’s interactions. Positive face, they argue, is the need for others’ approval. Conversely, negative face involves the need for autonomy, or the desire to be unimpeded by others. Further, communication between interlocutors could threaten each other’s positive face, negative face, or both, referred to as face-threatening-acts (FTAs). Children in our research sometimes took up a defensive orientation to saving their own face (e.g. “I just wanted to see what would happen if I put your mitten in the puddle”) and other times they took up a protective orientation toward saving others’ face (e.g. “You can have the small toy and I’ll have the big one, okay?”). Face-saving practices differ across cultures, societies, and contexts (Arundale, 2006; Bargiela-Chiappini, 2003), with studies reporting on cultural differences in the examination of speakers’ responses to compliments (Chen, 1993); perceptions of apology intentions (Park and Guan, 2009), and positive-face redress strategies (Ruzickova, 2007).

As was the case for the topic of cohesion, our searches have found that previous research on facework strategies of children was conducted many decades ago. For example, Hatch (1987) applied Goffman’s construct of facework to peer interactions in kindergarten classrooms and found that children aged 5–6 years had developed “a substantial, yet incomplete, knowledge of the norms, rules and expectations of adult facework” (p. 100). They tended to be less tactful than adults.

Research methods

The interactions at the sand center that are analyzed in this article come from a corpus of video-recordings of kindergarten children (aged 5–6 years) recorded by the teacher, Polly (all names of participants and communities are pseudonyms), a participant in our 6-year collaborative action research study teaching in Aspen Elementary School.

Research contexts and participants

Aspen, with a population of about 3000 people, is an agricultural-based working class community approximately 500 km north of a major urban area and 4000 km from our university. Polly had been teaching for 32 years at the time data were gathered. Children attend Polly’s kindergarten class half-time, with some attending only in the mornings or afternoons and some attending 2 full-days per week. All of the 32 children (20 girls and 12 boys) in her classes participated, with parental consent, in the research study. Their participation involved being video-recorded while playing at a center at some point during the school year. English is the mother tongue of Polly and of all the children in her class.

Polly’s kindergarten program is center-based and spreads across two large classrooms located across the hall from each other. In one room is a carpeted area with a SmartBoard for formal instruction, a classroom library, water table, paint easels, and a table used for crafts. The room across the hall houses the sand center, climbing equipment, a puppet theater, and a two-story frame house that has also served as a restaurant, a store, and other buildings, depending on the dramatic play theme of the month. Polly sets up 22 centers every month. Children are expected to visit each center during the daily 45-minute center times within a month and then can return to the centers they prefer, generally visiting most of the centers a few times per month.

Data collection

To record children’s language and actions while they were playing, Polly placed an iPod on a tripod on a table at various centers; usually twice weekly between October and May. We university researchers visited Polly and her students about every 6 weeks to get to know the students whose language we were analyzing, and to talk with Polly about children’s language use in the videos she was uploading to our secure website. We met with Polly during her preparation time to discuss observations of the children as learners and members of the classroom social network—factors that might help us to understand more fully and accurately the children’s interactions in the video clips. Also at this time, we asked Polly to provide additional contextual information about events preceding or following the play activity recorded in the videos.

Although Polly also recorded children’s interactions the dramatic play, puppet, and water centers, we selected videos recorded at the sand center to ensure consistency of the environment. As shown in Table 1, the sand center videos taken at the sand center ranged in length from 2 to 27 minutes. In each session, there was usually one teacher and a combination of boy and girl peers. Because children chose their centers each day, the groupings of children are random. The selected videos contain recorded images of 22 children.

Table 1.

Analyzed videos of children and Polly at sand center.

Video segment’s name	Time (in minutes)	Children in the video
Video segment’s name	Time (in minutes)	Boys	Girls
Playing in sand	14.57	2	1
Shoveling and playing in sand	9.01	1	1
Sanding houses	26.42	4 boys	0 girls
Secret base in the sand table	9.31	1 boy	2 girls
Playing farm	22.01	2 boys	2 girls
Sand table farm (two groups)	24.54	1 boy	3 girls
Farm in the sand table	9.09	2 boys	0
Total	114	13	9

Transcription and data analysis

The video clips were transcribed using the Jeffersonian Transcription System (http://mis.ucd.ie/wiki/JeffersonianTranscription), which includes a description of the children and teacher’s gestures, facial expressions, and actions alongside a verbatim transcription of the language, intonation, and pauses of each person in the video. To ensure consistency across the transcripts and accuracy of the transcribing, eight graduate student transcribers were trained by the same experienced graduate student transcriber and the team met every 6 weeks to transcribe common video clips and compare transcripts.

Our analysis units were communication acts, which include nonverbal modes, such as movement, gaze, touch, sound effect, speech intonation that are often used in combination, and/or an utterance used to carry out specific social purposes. We then identified within each communication act the participants in the communication act, the topic of the play context, the social purpose of the communication act, and whether there was evidence of verbal cohesion or facework strategies being used. We analyzed all 382 of children’s and Polly’s communication acts within the seven videos of play at the sand center, viewing the video clips frequently, in addition to reading transcripts, to ensure reliability and accuracy.

Our analysis of the social purposes of communication acts was based on Halliday’s (1969) seven functions of language. We defined the purposes in this way:

Instrumental—to satisfy one’s own needs

Regulatory—to get others to do something

Interactional—to get along with others/build relationships

Personal—to express individuality/emotions

Heuristic—to find out more about something or someone

Imaginative—to create a context beyond the immediate reality

Representational—to provide information/ideas

We used Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) six categories of cohesive devices to identify and understand how children and Polly used these devices (see Table 2 for examples). Our analysis of cohesion strategies was guided by the question: How are the children and Polly linking ideas and actions in the play narratives? We found that they used three of the devices: (a) repetition of a word in order to build on an idea introduced by a peer; (b) references—use of pronouns, gestures, or other actions to refer to something already mentioned or to something of future interest in the conversation; and (c) conjunctions to establish cohesion between ideas and sentences. In addition to the language-oriented cohesive strategies, we also considered the ways in which children used actions and speech sounds as cohesive strategies.

Table 2.

Examples of analysis of cohesive devices.

Cohesive device	Examples from participating children’s utterances during play at the sand center
References: mainly used to refer back to a word, idea or concept	This truck ordered um, dirt” We crashed in them . I’m burying it .
Conjunctions: Mainly used not only to join utterances but to hold or take the floor	See the door. And there’s the door. ‘ Cause I’m making a garden So he knows not to crash here.
Repetitions: Mainly used to create emphasis for imaginative usage, holding the floor, and regulating others’ behavior in the context of sand play	Nouns: Building, hundreds, castle, mud, Verb forms: sinking, trespass, Attention: Hey! Stop! Animal sounds: Oink, oink!

We also examined ways in which participating children and their teacher used verbal and nonverbal communication for four categories of facework, two involving autonomy and two involving inclusion (Brown and Levinson, 1987; Ting-Toomey, 1999). The autonomy-oriented facework strategies respond to a need for others to acknowledge one’s privacy and self-sufficiency, and at the same time, to show consideration of others’ need for independence. For example, when one child says to another “I’m gonna go wash my hands on the other side, okay?” she is demonstrating her independence and her need for non-imposition (face-restoration/self-autonomy). She simultaneously shows consideration for the need for freedom and space in the listener by using the word “okay” and smiling while shifting her gaze toward the peer, which acknowledges the listener’s need for control (face-saving/other-autonomy).

Two other strategies involve including others (e.g. face-giving/other inclusion and face-assertion/self-inclusion). These strategies respond to the need to be recognized by others as friendly and likable. Inclusion strategies include demonstrating cooperative behavior or expressing a need for collaboration. An example of how one utterance can show both sides of inclusion comes from Polly when she asks, “Are you sure Lego’s a good thing to bring in the sand table?” Polly is showing interest in the child’s play activity, appears pleasant, as well as giving the child the opportunity to cooperate with her suggestion. Polly effectively protects her own need for inclusion and supports the child’s need for inclusion. Facework strategies include using direct/indirect language to suggest/make requests, softening a request through the use of words such as “well,” “ok?,” and “just,” and using polite language. Our analysis was guided by the question: What do the children and Polly say and do to achieve the goals of facework (e.g. autonomy and inclusion)?

Findings

Children’s use of verbal and nonverbal communication to achieve social purposes

As Table 3 shows, participating children used language and nonverbal communication modes for a wide range of purposes, often for imaginative purposes. Children asked questions about the environment and conveyed facts and information to fill in gaps of knowledge, at times making connections to real-life experiences (e.g. “One of my cousins’ names is____”) and to cultural situations (“It’s Halloween already”). They talked about their own needs (e.g. “I need one of those fences” while using gestures and gaze to specify which fence). They frequently used language to describe their actions (“I’m gonna go wash my hands”), and used language, gaze, intonation, and gesture to assert ownership over an idea or object (“I found this animal!”), and their roles (“I’m a farmer!”).

Table 3.

Purposes of communication acts while playing in the sand box.

Functions of language	Percentage of communication acts(n = 382)
1. Imaginative	28
2. Representational	17
3. Regulatory	14
4. Personal	11
5. Imaginative hybrid	11
6. Heuristic	9
7. Instrumental	7
8. Interactional	3

We found that the instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, and representational categories overlapped with the imaginative purpose in many of the children’s communication acts, as the children’s play involved creating imagined contexts. As an example of the overlapping imaginative and regulatory purposes, children were in the role of farmers when they used language, intonation, and gestures for regulatory purposes, such as directing peers to move a toy animal off their farmland. These overlapping purposes are further demonstrated in this excerpt from Secret Base in the Sand Table.

Rick:

I’m building a secret base.

Polly:

What’s your–what’s your base for?

Rick:

The military.

Polly:

The military! Military base.

Rick:

I’m building a cage for my dinosaur.

Polly:

Is that their secret weapon? Yeah?

Rick:

I’m gonna put some dirt in it.

Polly:

He’s kind of ferocious. Maybe he’s their security system, hey?

Rick:

Yeah he is.

Polly:

Maybe he is. Kind of unexpected. No one’s going to expect that when they come attack.

Rick:

He can break the fence. Only when he sees an enemy.

Polly:

So how do you protect the people who are–this military. How do you protect them from him?

Rick:

The–the military–he’s the military’s pet.

Here, Rick announces the imaginative context for his sand play, creating a military base with a pet dinosaur as security. Polly asks questions to encourage Rick to build on this context. Because he is explaining how the military base is protected, his language, in our view, is for imaginative and representational purposes. In addition, he describes what he is doing (instrumental purpose) within the imaginative context: building a secret base and building a cage for his dinosaur. Because their hands are handling objects in the sand center and their gaze is on those objects, Rick and Polly use head movement and tone of voice as nonverbal modes of communication. Polly’s voice rises in intonation at the end of her questions and Rick’s voice becomes louder toward the end of each response to her question. It seems that he starts with a softer voice as he begins to create the narrative and then speaks with greater emphasis as the narrative falls into place about the role of the pet dinosaur in the military. His head also moves as he provides information to create a context for his pet dinosaur in the sand center.

We also found that children used language and nonverbal communication modes in the sand center to provide information about themselves. Often, either the physical object or the imaginative role assigned to the object provided a starting point for sharing information about themselves. We coded the communication acts as carrying out a representational purpose if they narrated events and as achieving a personal intention if the communication act conveyed emotion (e.g. Tina was frightened about riding a running horse). In the following example, excerpted from a later portion of the same video, Tina provides information about herself having ridden a real horse once, narrating the events. Rick, not to be outdone, provides evidence that he has opportunity to ride real horses on a regular basis because he has six horses.

Tina:

Once I rided a real horse.

Polly:

Yeah? Once you did?

Rick:

I have a farm and I have six horses.

Tina:

I never rided a horse before and it was my first time riding it. It didn’t run. Because I was too scared if it would run. So, I just had a walk.

In the telling of real-life stories, gaze and gesture, as well as tone of voice, figure prominently in the communication of information. Tina and Rick look at each other and at Polly, and Tina makes gestures indicating horse movement when talking about her first time riding a horse.

Children’s and teacher’s use of facework strategies

We found that the facework strategies carried out by the children and Polly depended upon the purpose of the utterance. Children’s facework while using language for instrumental purposes involved asking for assistance and information using “please,” asserting ownership over an object or a space or their role in dramatic play using words expressions such as, “I just want…” Children’s use of language and nonverbal communication for interactional purposes involved facework strategies, such as polite invitations to their peers and teachers to go along with the storyline, accepting correction from peers and teacher, negotiating for possession/ownership, offering and accepting help and advice, and complimenting their peers. When children used language for regulatory purposes, their facework strategies involved the use of “softer” or mitigating language.

In several instances across the play sessions, Polly exhibited facework strategies by (a) modeling real-life social rules; (b) playing the role of mediator; (c) showing interest in others’ and their activities; and (d) directing children’s actions and behavior. In the following excerpt from the video, Sand Table Farm, Polly’s face-giving strategies take the form of showing interest by asking questions and gaze—focusing on the children’s activities in the sand center:

Michelle and Karli talk while Danny plays silently.

Teacher in background:

Good job, Sam.

Karli:

Oh. I like your shirt. It’s so adult.

Polly comes over and helps Michelle put a fallen object back on a shelf.

Polly:

Oh, did they tip over? Let me help you.

Danny is ready to leave the sand centre and notices his pants are dirty.

Danny:

These are wor–these are work pants!

Danny:

These are work pants. They’re allowed to get dirty.

Giving compliments is a face-giving strategy which shows that children are including others. This makes the compliment-bestower look good, as well. For example, when Karli says to Michelle “I like your shirt. It’s so adult,” she’s giving a compliment, attaching another idea that her peer is capable of making adult choices in fashion. By making her peer feel good, Michelle is also positioning herself as someone who can contribute positively to the small-group interaction. Gaze is also important to the compliment-giving strategy, as the children and Polly always turn their gaze toward the person they are complimenting.

Children’s face assertion strategies include expressing a degree of emotion or placing emphasis on the child’s viewpoint (e.g. “These are work pants!”). Emphatic intonation, together with a gaze directed at the person who seems to be questioning what the child is doing, contribute to children’s face assertion communication acts.

There were also a few instances of face-saving or protecting someone’s positive face, coming mostly from Polly, the teacher. She often used phrases like “alright,” “okay,” and gave direction to help guide the children: “Okay, don’t lose any of the pieces.” Polly also asked questions as a face-saving mechanism. By asking “Do you think that’s a good idea?” she was giving the child autonomy over his actions and decision making.

Children’s and teacher’s use of cohesion strategies

Throughout the seven play sessions that we examined in the sand box we observed that children’s most frequently employed cohesion strategy was to make references to nouns that had previously been used in the conversation using pronouns. For the most part, children used references such as it, that, and they. Along with language, children used intonation to communicate meaning, emphasizing the verb in the utterances where pronoun references created cohesion. Again, because the children’s gaze and hands were sand center-focused, intonation and head movements were the predominant nonverbal forms of communication.

Children used conjunctions and repetition for cohesive purposes, repeating what a peer had said and then adding to it. Typically, children used conjunctions or repeated the last word a peer said at the start of a communication act in order to connect their contribution to a play narrative with something a peer had previously contributed. For example, children followed a peer’s assertion about taking a role in the play with “And you can…” In one instance, a child made oinking sounds after a peer referred to a toy pig, linking the introduction of the pig to the children’s subsequent use of the toy pigs in the sand center through the oinking sounds.

In the excerpt below, Sand Table Farm, four peers (all boys) are interacting with the teacher, Polly.

Ryder:

Then we gotta bury this one. Gotta bury this one.

Jace:

That guy’s.

Ryder:

There now. Now they’re all buried.

And later…

Polly:

Oh my! How come these are all buried?

Ryder:

I don’t know.

Polly:

Was there an avalanche?

Polly describes an avalanche.

Polly:

When it starts rolling down the hill and it starts coming really, really fast.

Ryder:

Yeah, that’s what was happen.

Ryder:

So they were digged underground, so we buried them.

Polly:

Oh my, and you rescued them!

Here, the children are playing with an imaginary farm and use references to indicate the elements and/or animals in the play sequence. Children and Polly jointly create a cohesive narrative of what happened to the toy dinosaurs using phrases such as “that guy’s” and “So they were digged underground,” together with gestures and head movements to identify the objects and actions being referenced. The children never seem to ask for clarification about the objects or their roles. When Jace says “that guy’s” in response to Polly’s question, he is not only pointing by using the reference and gestures, but also clarifying. Following Polly’s description/explanation of the avalanche, the children confirm their co-constructed knowledge with Polly and with each other by affirming “That’s [what happened].” As part of the ongoing talk, the use of conjunctions goes beyond joining sentences. As in Polly’s utterance, “and you rescued them,” conjunctions and pronoun references link a speaker’s turn, build on the imaginary context, and promote the forward motion of the narrative.

Discussion and implications

Our research furthers work (e.g. King and Dockrell, 2016) on the contributions of informal classroom interactions as a forum for supporting and developing children’s communication. We found that 5-year-old children in Polly’s kindergarten class drew on their cultural knowledge to make connections to peers’ and their teacher’s ideas/actions in order to create coherent narratives in their sand play. They communicated verbally and nonverbally for a range of purposes, showing remarkable adeptness in adapting linguistic and semiotic knowledge to carry out face-saving goals of including peers and of providing autonomy to others. We recognize that children’s background with language experiences and range of interactions with children and the play contexts have had an impact on their participation in the sand center play. Our analysis was of a small number of children whose background experiences with the facework and cohesion strategies of the small community in which they had lived and may not be generalizable to a larger, more diverse population. However, in the following discussion, we make a case for a consideration of children’s verbal and nonverbal communication when supporting and assessing young children’s communication, broadening the focus beyond vocabulary and syntax (e.g. Bradfield et al., 2014; Craig and Washington, 2002; Crevola and Vineis, 2004). We also argue that recognition of children’s cultural knowledge should go beyond identification of children’s initiation/response and turn-taking to support sustained conversation (e.g. King and Dockrell, 2016) to include their use of cohesion and facework strategies.

Social and cultural knowledge communicated in the sand center

Children in Polly’s class drew on social and cultural understandings in their use of language and other modes of communication for a wide range of purposes and in their use of facework strategies. As in previous research spanning many decades (e.g. Peterson et al., 2018; Smilansky, 1968; Tough, 1976), participating children used talk and nonverbal communication modes to accomplish a wide range of purposes while playing in the sand. Often, children put linguistic and nonverbal communication modes to work in order to carry out other purposes within the imagined context (e.g. to imagine and to represent; as well as to imagine and to direct others’ behavior). The symbolic thought involved in using language to transform the sand center into a military base, a farm, and other imagined settings, is reflective of the representational thinking of reading and writing (Sawyer and DeZutter, 2009). Children demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of language as a tool for creating meanings beyond the immediate environment when using language to describe imagined contexts in their sand center play. Children used problem-solving and abstract thinking as they explained the roles, ways of interacting, setting, and other elements of the imagined context, often using speech intonation and head movements as part of their communicative strategies. The representative language typically valued in schools (Alexander, 2008; Cazden, 2008; Radford et al., 2011) was a prominent part of children’s interactions while at the sand center, particularly when Polly asked children to tell her more about how things work in the imagined contexts.

The children in Polly’s class demonstrated deliberateness in adapting communicative tools and understandings to contribute to the ongoing, collaboratively constructed narrative in ways that saved the face of others and protected their own face. In contrast with kindergarteners in previous research (Hatch, 1987), they employed facework strategies on numerous occasions in their play at the sand center. The children used negotiating language, gaze, and gestures to get others to do things (achieving a regulatory purpose), and complimented and showed empathy with peers to develop relationships with others (achieving an interactional purpose). Participating children used polite language and tone of voice, as well as tag questions, such as “Okay?.” They tempered types of words and expressions, such as “I just wanted…,” and changed the intonation of their voice for these purposes, as well.

By joining in the play, the teacher, Polly was able to model facework strategies. Showing interest in the children’s sand play narratives and constructions, and extending children’s narratives were two ways in which Polly carried out informal teaching that responded to the contexts created by children. She was not intentional in modeling facework strategies, as her participation in the play was based on the social knowledge that she had learned over a lifetime of interactions with children and adults.

Teachers may find our research useful to guide interactions with children in their classrooms. For example, teachers may become aware of facework strategies and model them when they see that the communication/flow of the play is disrupted because children are not attentive to each other’s face needs. In addition, teachers can use recording devices to help them recognize what children show about their communicative knowledge in their play. They might identify the social purposes of children’s multimodal communication using a template that we designed together to capture children’s use of language (Portier and Peterson, 2017). Teachers gather useful information about how their students use language and other modes to carry out social intentions. Children’s contributions to the creation of the play narrative and to protecting and saving face can be recognized, rather than privileged speech forms related to social class, as found by Miller and Sperry (2012). Children’s communicative abilities are not reduced to a tally of frequencies of their use of levels of vocabulary (Dunn and Dunn, 2007) or syntax (Crevola and Vineis, 2004).

Children’s use of cohesive devices to create a flow of meaning-making

Like the children in previous research (e.g. Peterson and Dodsworth, 1991), children in Polly’s class capably used cohesive devices to keep up a flow of meaning-making in their play. They used pronouns to refer to objects and people in the imagined sand center contexts and repeated words to get others’ attention in order to make connections between events in the play. The children used conjunctions at the start of an utterance to show relationships between actions and intentions or between various actions.

We also propose that teachers can consider children’s use of cohesion strategies to maintain the flow of the play in their assessment of children’s language. Although research has shown across decades that children use cohesive devices in peer interactions, these linguistic features are not typical elements assessed in oral language assessment tools available for teachers’ classroom use (e.g. British Columbia Education, 2004; Scholastic Canada, 2011). The ability to maintain cohesion within a conversation is implied in these assessment tools’ criteria, such as whether children stay on topic when providing information orally, and whether they use pronouns (e.g. Scholastic Canada, 2011: unpaged), but there is no recognition of the contributions to meaning-making of pronouns to maintain cohesion, nor of children’s use of other cohesive strategies, such as repetition and conjunctions. Following up on these findings, teachers might actively seek ways to incorporate children’s use of cohesive devices in classroom assessment practices and tools. In addition, given that children’s use of cohesive devices in oral interactions provides a foundation for later use of cohesive ties to provide a flow of ideas in writing (Halliday and Hasan, 1976), teachers may also explore ways to build on children’s cohesive strategies in their play interactions in the teaching of written narratives.

Our analysis of children’s and their teacher’s interactions at the sand center reinforces findings from previous research regarding the important contributions of play as a context for children’s communicative and social learning (Harden, 2015; Moyles, 2015; Tough, 1976; Wajskop and Peterson, 2015). Findings regarding children’s use of cohesive and facework strategies do not have the same depth of support from previous research and stem from a singular context, the sand center in one kindergarten teacher’s classroom. As such, we believe that the value lies not in efforts at broad generalization of findings, but rather in contributions to a broader view of pedagogical support and assessment of children’s communication knowledge and skills. Our collaborative analysis, drawing on a linguist’s knowledge about particular communicative competencies that have typically been examined in adult interactions, and a former primary teacher’s intuitive interpretations of young children’s and their teacher’s interactions, provides a starting point for this broader perspective.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Polly and her students for participating in this collaborative action research project and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for funding the research through a Partnership Grant. We thank the teachers and students for their participation in the Northern Oral Language and Writing Through Play (NOW Play) Project.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

ORCID iD

Shelley Stagg Peterson

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