Hearing children’s voices through a conversation analysis approach

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article introduces the methodological approach of conversation analysis (CA) and demonstrates its usefulness in presenting more authentic documentation and analysis of children’s voices. Grounded in ethnomethodology, CA has recently gained interest in the area of early childhood studies due to the affordances it holds for gaining access to children’s social interactions that would otherwise be unnoticed. It differs from psychological methods for the study of children’s social worlds in that it avoids using predefined categories of behaviour, and instead uses an inductive approach, allowing children’s voices to be understood in ways that are meaningful to children themselves.A discussion around how CA has demonstrated its usefulness in the endeavour to hear children’s voices in early childhood education research and pedagogy will be given, including studies on children’s trauma talk and children’s cross-culture interactions in educational contexts. Transcriptions from a corpus of international data involving children aged 2½ – 4 years will be presented to show how CA supports researchers and teachers to fully realise the contribution children make to their own everyday lives as competent and capable citizens.