A longitudinal study of the discourse units in mealtime family interactions

Abstract

The aim of the study is to contribute to the research on the discursive environment at home in which the development of narration, argumentation and explanation takes place during preschool years. The development of these discursive forms is relevant to the linguistic, cognitive and social dimensions of child development and to how their mastery constitutes a requirement to participate in classroom practices (Heller, 2014). Although the discursive units are intertwined in everyday interactions, previous studies have mainly analyzed each form in isolation without addressing how they are deployed together and how they configure the texture of the conversation. In the present paper we analyze the structural and interactional organization of the narratives, explanations and arguments produced during mealtimes in Argentinian Spanish monolingual homes. The corpus consists of 22 mealtime situations audio-recorded in 11 middle-income households at two time points, when children were 4 and 5 years old (Author, 2013-2019). Following Quasthoff et al. (2017) we identified the discourse units as segments delimited from the surrounding turn-by-turn talk, each type serving a different communicative function. Preliminary findings from the statistical analysis carried out on 181 discourse units showed that narratives were the most frequent and complex units (they included other embedded units) as compared to argumentations and explanations. Most narratives were intraconversational, while explanations and argumentations were mainly triggered by an object or an action salient in the situation. Children globally initiated 24% of the units. They contributed to most of the narrative accounts, but mainly listened to the argumentative and the explanatory units produced by adults. The findings of this study contribute to the understanding of home discursive practices, which are relevant to the requirements of classroom discourse, from a perspective that comprehensively contemplates different forms of discourse, as well as diverse interactional and structural aspects involved.