Language and Social Interaction at Home and School

Book excerpt: As Ragnar Rommetveit put it forty years ago, dialogue is “the architecture of intersubjectivity”: a tool not only for maintaining yet also constantly transforming our life-worlds. The volume advances and empirically illustrates the role of talk-in-interaction in displaying, ratifying, creating yet also defying the crucial dimensions of the world we live in. This process is particularly noticeable in children’s primary social worlds, i.e. home and school where they are socialized to becoming competent members of the communities they (will) live in. Drawing on fifty years of research on children's socialization through language and social interaction, the volume provides new multidisciplinary insights and updated empirical data on the process through which cultures, identities, and knowledge are brought into being through the everyday dialogues that animate children’s life at home and school. The volume addresses a specialized readership and its interdisciplinary framework ensures that it will be of great interest to scholars from different academic fields, such as social and developmental psychology, anthropology, education, developmental linguistics, sociolinguistics and developmental pragmatics.