Language as context: A case of early literacy practices in New Zealand and Sweden

Globally, there has been increasing adaptation of curricula frameworks in early childhood education, providing overarching principles of practice rather than subject specific templates for teaching and learning. While such a movement is to be commended as supporting a socio-cultural approach in meeting each child’s unique social and cultural needs, the implementation of frameworks is not straightforward (Bateman 2022 Bateman, A. 2022. “Participation.” In Talking with Children: A Handbook for Early Childhood Education, edited by A. Church and A. Bateman. Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]). By applying an ethnomethodological approach to child–teacher interactions, this article explores how early childhood curricula frameworks in Sweden and New Zealand are implemented in everyday talk-in-interaction between children and teachers. We use an ethnomethodological (EM) approach (Garfinkel 2002 Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. Ethnomethodology’s Program. London: Rowman and Littlefield. [Google Scholar]) and conversation analysis (CA) (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974 Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A Simplest Systematics for the Organisation of Turn-taking for Conversation.” Language 50: 696–735.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) approach (EMCA) to situate language as context. This approach offers a move away from the broader perspective of context being a static environmental space, to context as co-constructed by the participants through their immediate interactions (Goodwin and Duranti 1992 Goodwin, Charles, and Alessandro Duranti. 1992. “Rethinking Context: An Introduction.” In Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, edited by Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin, 1–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]). Contextual resources involve the concrete social situations, background cultural knowledge, language, activity and situation types, participants’ knowledge about topics talked about and about each other and their interactional biographies (Linell 2009 Linell, Per. 2009. Rethinking Language, Mind, and World Dialogically: Interactional and Contextual Theories of Human Sense-making. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. [Google Scholar], 17).