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The paper explores the involvement of teachers, children, and parents in a project based on learning a second language (L2) within a multicultural context. The study accounts for the participants’ transitions across school and family and aims to analyze their representations about the implementation and the adaptation of the project. The investigation involves three classes of primary schools—1st and 2nd levels—and two kindergarten classes, for a total of 15 teachers, 169 children aged 3–7 years old, and their families, living in French-speaking areas of Switzerland and representing 20 different nationalities. By combining different data sources (teachers’ and parents’ interviews, ethnographic observations of children’s activities), we explore how participants have implemented an educational program through various adaptations in their transition from a traditional way of teaching/learning L2 to a new model inspired by the Narrative Format. Through an inductive approach and a qualitative analysis of data, we present the main evidences of these transitions, detecting the conditions that facilitate the acquisition of languages and accounting for arguments connected to the heterogeneous, conditional, and context-dependent knowledge within and outside the school.

This is an introductory paper to the special section “Multilingual learning and social inclusion of children: The development of educational programmes to connect school and family”.

The aim of this paper is to highlight and discuss advantages and constraints of different methods applied within the field of children's thinking studies, through the test of the repeated question hypothesis validity, using the conservation of liquid task. In our perspective, the Piagetian interview is an ecologically valid context for externalization and modification of children's thinking. We used an experimental procedure organized in standard and modified tasks, involving primary school children in Serbia. The results of quantitative and qualitative analyses show that the repeated question is not the unique cause of children's misleading in demonstrating to understand conservation. Other dimensions explain why children change their answers when they are tested by the two tasks we used, which offers an insight into the influence of research procedures on children's answers.

This work studies verbal conflict between parents and preadolescents through analysis of family dinnertime conversations. We move from the assumption that verbal conflict is an educational instrument of interaction and a tool of socialization. The aim of the research is to analyze the participants' strategies in situations of conflict and to highlight the relations between parents and preadolescents in these specific situations. The data collection methodology is mainly ethnographical: videotape recordings of Italian middle class family dinners (the families were selected as being dual career ones with two children) were fully transcribed and codified following the approach of Conversation Analysis. The results of the quantitative (by the use of the log-linear models) and qualitative analyses confirm the importance of verbal conflict in family context as a particular cultural strategy of relationships between parents and preadolescents. The analytical data underline the relations between different aspects of conflict and the pragmatic implications for all family members at dinnertime conversations.