Interactional and multimodal resources in children’s game explanations

Abstract

This paper investigates how adults support pre-school children when accomplishing game explanations. Game explanations are ‘big packages’ that require specific discourse competences to establish local and global coherence. As explanations in general, they have the overall goal to distribute knowledge about a particular matter to the recipient(s). Analyses of explanations of 4-year-old children (n = 20) are presented who were asked to explain a board game to their caregiver. The following questions are addressed: (1) How do the caregivers support the children’s management of explaining the game by co-constructing global and local coherence? (2) What resources do the parents employ to maintain understanding throughout the explanation in order to support and ensure the transfer of knowledge? Analysis will concentrate on the adults’ multimodal practices to establish local and global coherence in the ongoing game explanations, and on their practices to achieve understanding on what the game is about and how it is played. The results will be discussed in relation to game explanations’ underlying function of stepwise knowledge transition, and with regard to developmental issues concerning the use of multimodal practices as scaffolding devices in situated talk.