Peers have more influence than parents on children’s language structures
(Goodwin, 1997). Peer talk increasingly plays an important role in children’s
socialization. In children’s interaction, there are two major concerns, inclusion and
power (Kyratzis, 2004). That is, once children share an activity with a peer, they try to
prevent it from being intruded by others. For those who want to get involved, they have
to come up with some access strategies. Once their access to play becomes an enduring
quality of a specific relationship, it is regarded as inclusion. In contrast, if the
uninvolved children are still not allowed to participate in the activity, exclusion occurs.
In attempt to construct their own social organization, children make use of different
embodied language practices (Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2011). Language practices include
directives, disputes, gossip, storytelling, collaborative narration, and collaborative
teasing (Hadley, 2003).
Goodwin has been dedicated to studying forms of language in children’s
interaction for several decades. She has explored various language practices in peer
interaction, such as disputes, gossip1, and directives. Dispute and gossip, parts of social
1 As noted in Goodwin (1980), gossip is often defined as a talk between two co-present parties concerning an absent third party.
fabric of peer groups, are two issues Goodwin is concerned with, especially those
within female groups. Goodwin (2002) documented girls’ ability to negotiate disputes
in the midst of games. In girls’ arguments, it seemed that practices of exclusion are
omnipresent. According to Goodwin (2002), exclusion was accomplished not only in a
rather covert way but also in a direct and explicit way. Girls made use of resources like
assessments, bald imperatives, insults, and stories to portray the target in a negative
way (Goodwin, 2002, p. 396). Despite the omnipresence of exclusion, Goodwin (2002)
argued that dispute is still downplayed in female social organization since girls are often
portrayed as inclusive, cooperative and collaborative. Also, she analyzed and examined the procedures for organizing the ‘he-said-she-said’ gossip event used by black female
children (Goodwin, 1980). She claimed that the ordering and negotiation are achieved
through language, such as the syntactic structure of opening accusation statement. In
some cases, the ‘he-said-she-said’ led to confrontations. To take actions against the
offense from others, girls were likely to make use of multiple types of stories, such as
instigating stories, retold stories, hypothetical stories, and harvested parallel stories
(Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2011).
In addition to disputes and gossip, Goodwin also explored the use of directives.
8
For example, she studied fourth graders’ jump rope games and found that the
grammatical structure of directives varied during different phases of the activity
(Goodwin, 2001). To develop the rope activity, for instance, children commonly used
bald imperatives (e.g., ‘Faster. Come on!’). She claimed that both girls and boys in the
position of power use direct forms to organize the activity and exclude others. It was
suggested that directives may play a role in accomplishing social order (Goodwin,
2001). Moreover, she noticed the use of threat in directives. She discussed how threat
enhances seriousness of the directives (Goodwin, 2005).
Rather than focusing on hierarchical relationships and exclusion as in Goodwin
(2001, 2005), Eder (1988, 1998) paid attention to the collaboration in adolescent talk.
Collaborative talk, in her definition, refers to a type of talk in which utterances ratify or
support the previous utterances in some manner, and the support can be presented via
explicit agreement, utterance expansion, or repetition (Eder, 1998). Eder (1988)
examined strategies for delivering collaborative personal narratives in naturally
occurring conversations. She claimed that the strategies reflect sociolinguistic rules
(e.g., dividing the different speech function of description and evaluation among the
different speakers) and grammatical rules (e.g., exploiting repetition and sentence
completions to maintain coherence) of narratives. According to Eder (1998),
collaborative narration makes a contribution to the formation of adolescent peer culture
because it provides chances for adolescents to negotiate their individual identities. It
also verifies that peer culture is different from adult culture. She also found that
adolescents use collaborative narration and collaborative teasing to mock others (Eder,
1998). Precisely, she asserted that girls use both collaborative narration and
collaborative teasing, whereas boys count on collaborative narration (Eder, 1998, p. 89).
The primary difference between collaborative narration and collaborative teasing is that
teasing has an association with directing mocking at others while narration has more to
do with self-mocking. Eder’s results showed that collaboration in the talk brings about
a feeling of solidarity (Eder, 1988, p. 226).
In respect of Mandarin-speaking children’s interaction, Hadley (2003) observed
Taiwanese kindergarteners in school settings, and paid attention to a particular language
practice, word play. She advocated that word play is not merely a source for fun but a
mechanism to display children’s social agency as to enact and resist the teacher’s desire
for them to behave as good students. Meanwhile, a sense of collective group identity
and sharing was highlighted (Hadley, 2003, p. 204).
10
Farris (1991, 2000) composed a longitudinal study to investigate how gender was
constructed among Taiwanese preschoolers. Through her examination of verbal and
nonverbal interactions in same-sex groups, it showed that boys created a childish ethos
centering on action, competition, and aggression. Girls, dissimilar to boys, created a
feminine ethos focusing on the construction and maintenance of relations or on
authoritarian roles based on teacher models. In cross-sex interactions, she signified that
peer leaders played a part in producing gender. Both boys and girls worked hard on
maintaining and highlighting gender boundaries. In addition, she found that girls used
not only a mitigated but an aggravated style (i.e., a masculine sex-typed style) in
cross-sex conflicts. Similarly, Kuo (2011) suggested that young girls make initial oppositions
as likely as boys do. It indicated that young girls are not inclined to maintain social
harmony.