This study examines how members of a peer group of Mexican immigrant preschool girls attending a bilingual Spanish-English preschool classroom in California used code-switching practices to negotiate local effects in moment-to-moment sequences of interaction (Auer 1998; Gumperz & Cook-Gumperz 2005; Jorgensen 1998). The study also examines how group members used code-switching practices to negotiate "more broadly held ideologies about the relationship and meanings of the two languages" (Schieffelin 2003:158; see also Evaldsson 2005; Garrett & Baquendano-López 2002; Paugh 2005; Zentella 1997). Two episodes of play from a larger, ethnographic study of children’s free play peer interactions conducted at a bilingual Spanish-English preschool serving low-income (predominantly) Mexican immigrant and Mexican descent families in California are examined. The examples illustrate how code-switching is a resource that the children use to shift the "participation frameworks" (Goffman 1981; C. Goodwin & M.H. Goodwin 2004; M.H. Goodwin 1990; 2006) of their play. The examples also illustrate how the children construct their own stances, alternatively "doing being bilingual" (Auer 1984) as well as inscribing a domain-related allocation and regimentation of the codes (Hill & Hill 1986; Kroskrity 2000; Minks 2006; Reynolds 2009; Schieffelin 1994; Silverstein 2003; Woolard 1998). At alternative moments, this regimentation could be challenged, through the children’s language practices within the peer group. Findings are discussed in terms of theories of children’s language socialization (Ochs 1986; Garrett & Baquendano-López 2002; Schieffelin 1994, 2003) and peer language socialization of one another within the peer group (Goodwin & Kyratzis 2007; Kyratzis 2004).

Amy Kyratzis is an Associate Professor in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at University of California, Santa Barbara. Her emphases are Child and Adolescent Development, Cultural Perspectives & Comparative Education, Teaching & Learning, and her research interests include language development, bilingual language development, language socialization, socialization of gender and bilingual practices in children’s peer interactions, and children’s narrative and emergent literacy. Her research and that of her students focuses on children's discourse in naturally-occurring contexts such as friendship groups within nursery school classrooms and peer cooperative learning groups within elementary school classrooms. Through understanding children’s peer interactions in the classroom, educators may be in a better position to promote gender equity and improve the engagement of girls and boys of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds in classroom interaction and learning. She received her doctorate from the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York.

Chavajay and Rogoff (2002) assessed cross-cultural differences in the way children are socialized to interact with others. The authors argue that the Euro-American middle-class "dyadic prototype interaction of one-partner-at-a-time" (2002:144) is in clear contrast with Guatemalan Mayan children’s socialization in which children routinely participate in "complex multidirectional shared arrangements" (Rogoff 2003:145). They further state that this difference has effects on the role children play in apprenticeship situations.

Along this line, scholars in the language socialization field have highlighted participatory complexity and sociocentrism in children’s communicative environments (de León 1998, Ochs & Schieffelin 1984). In this paper, I argue for the theoretical value of triadic interaction in language acquisition and socialization. In examining corporeal arrangements, face formations, and preferred participation frameworks, I show how Zinacantec Mayan children develop a participatory competence as overhearers. In the design of the overhearer, I distinguish between overhearers as intended or non-intended addressees. As intended addressees, young children are socialized to listen to others, as they are constructed as the targets of teasing, shaming, scolding, or accusations. As non-intended addressees, I analyze how young children find their way into being focal participants. Here multimodality is central in how they coordinate their actions with other participants.

Studies with older children have shown that triadic participation frameworks offer many important socializing resources. I also show how, in Zinacantan, directives are accomplished with triadic participation frameworks, as well as with indirection and affect. In sum, I show that the overhearer participant status affords the child with observation, attention, inference, and participation long before he/she learns to speak.

Lourdes de León is Professor of Language Studies at CIESAS Mexico, D.F. with interdisciplinary interests in anthropology, developmental psychology, and education. She is most passionate about Mayan languages (Tzotzil, in particular), Mixteco, semantics, first language acquisition, the socialization of children, interaction, discourse, the language-cognition interface, non-verbal communication, children’s culture, education, anthropology and linguistics of the law, and multiculturalism. Her recent work explores child language after the age of five, including the subtle development of communicative competence in Tzotzil, such as the use of humor, verbal games, conversation, argumentation, and narrative. She sees the documentation of child language as a key piece in the understanding of the vitality of a language, the reproduction of a culture and of human cognition. She received her doctorate in Linguistics at the University of Sussex, England.

Nearly everybody who believes that language and culture/society are somehow intimately connected now also believes that an understanding of attitudes, beliefs, and ideologies form a crucial (explanatory) part of a our investigations of language variation and change. Although one may adduce such matters from the statistical realizations of features in language performance and test for them in a variety of experimental settings, the analysis of everyday talk about language remains underexploited. Linguists of all stripes do not lack the ability to analyze talk, but the trick in the folk linguistic field has been to relate such often structurally oriented analyses to the "content" (where "content" is broadly defined) of talk about talk. I will summarize approaches in this area and try to sort out and illustrate in more detail some that have proved most fruitful.

Dennis R. Preston is Professor of English, Oklahoma State University and University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and English, Michigan State University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Indiana Southeast, Hawaii, Arizona, Michigan, Copenhagen; he was a Fulbright Senior Researcher in Poland and Brazil and was Co-Director of the 1990 TESOL Institute and Director of the 2003 Linguistic Society of America Institute, both at Michigan State. He was President of the American Dialect Society (2001-2) and has served on the Executive Boards of that society, the International Conference on Methods in Dialectology, New Ways of Analyzing Variation, and the Linguistic Society of America, as well as the editorial boards of Language, Impact, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Kwartalkik Filologiczny, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Compass, and as a reader for numerous other journals, publishers, and granting agencies. His work focuses on sociolinguistics, dialectology, ethnography, and minority language and variety education. He is perhaps best known for the revitalization of folk linguistics, particularly perceptual dialectology, and for attempts to provide variationist accounts of second language acquisition. He has directed four recent NSF grants, two in folk linguistics and two in language variation and change and is invited frequently for presentations in both academic and popular venues. His most recent book-length publications are, with Nancy Niedzielski, Folk Linguistics (2000), with Daniel Long, A Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, Volume II (2002), Needed Research in American Dialects (2003), and, with Brian Joseph and Carol G. Preston, Linguistic diversity in Michigan and Ohio (2005). He is a fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic in 2004. He is a recipient of the Michigan State Distinguished Faculty Award and the Paul Varg Alumni Award of the College of Arts and Letters also at Michigan State.

The practices of repair first described by Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks (1977) constitute one of the generic orders of organization in talk-in-interaction. One of these practices is "inserting" — that is, stopping the talk in progress in order to insert one or more elements. Examples include: Hey do you see V- (0.3) fat ol' Vivian anymore? (in which fat old is inserted) — cited in Schegloff (1979); and He's about the only regular< he's about the only good regular out there (in which good is inserted) — analysed in Schegloff (1987). Building on this earlier work, I am undertaking (with Ann Weatherall, Victoria University of Wellington) a large-scale, systematic study of insertion repair, drawing on a collection of more than 400 candidate instances, spanning British, New Zealand and North American English. On the basis of our findings I will show that both instances of repair cited above have rather unusual technical features. I will identify the default form of the technology of insertions (from which these instances depart) and will focus in particular on the substantial subgroup of our collection in which what is inserted is a 'defining adjective'. These are adjectives which do not merely describe the object being referred to (as fat old describes Vivian, or good describes the regular) but help to define or classify it. So, for example, date is modified by the insertion of blind which does not simply describe it, but defines the kind of date that it is; likewise, tissues is modified by the insertion of soft, wool is modified by the insertion of cotton, and so on. The insertion of these defining adjectives, like the insertion of prefixes (e.g. the insertion of ex- to modify wife) or part-words (e.g. the insertion of news to modify letter) change the characterization of the referent using the technology of insertion (rather than the technology of replacement). Time permitting, I will also look at some of the interactional tasks that insertion repairs are used to perform.

Sue Wilkinson, PhD is Professor of Feminist and Health Studies in the Social Sciences Department at Loughborough University, UK. She is the founding editor of the international journal, Feminism & Psychology and her publications encompass six books — including Feminist Social Psychologies, Feminism and Discourse, and Heterosexuality (all Sage Publications) — and more than eighty scholarly articles. She has a longstanding academic interest in the social construction of inequality and is also a campaigner for equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. She (re)trained in conversation analysis at UCLA in 2001-2002 and her recent work uses conversation analysis to study both everyday interactions and institutional talk, particularly on helplines run by a number of charities, including the Fibromyalgia Association (UK) and Breast Cancer Care. She has a particular interest in the technologies — and interactional uses — of repair.