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In kindergarten, children are usually engaged with both verbal activities and non-verbal activities, often requiring the manipulation of physical objects. During technical tasks (e.g., problem solving), children can use argumentation as one of the languages of science that mediates how they interact with the surrounding world. In this paper, we focused on technical tasks in kindergarten in order to understand to what extent activities requiring the manipulation of physical objects also leave space for argumentation. The study involved 25 children engaged in three problem-solving activities requiring the manipulation of Lego® and some recycled materials. To analyze the non-verbal (embodied) side of the argumentative activities, we firstly identified the argumentative structure of each exchange involving the participants. Then, we focused on segments of “incomplete” argumentative dialogues (i.e., presenting only some elements typical of children’s argumentation) by appealing to multimodal representations (speech, gestures, and physical objects). The findings of the study showed that even apparently incomplete exchanges can have an argumentative function generated by non-verbal elements of the interactions. Investigating the role of embodied argumentation during technical tasks in kindergarten can allow teachers to recognize and further develop children’s argumentative resources.

Studies of argumentation in education have increased in the last few decades, to analyze how people learn to argue, and how it is possible to improve practices of arguing to learn. Overall, these studies have shown that argumentation at school rarely occurs spontaneously, in contrast to the dialogical practices in informal settings, although the argumentative capacities of young children, even at preschool level, have been already highlighted. Other studies have been specifically devoted to examining the role of teachers in establish the conditions to engage pupils in argumentation: how to present instruction, how to motivate them to argue, how to guarantee a proper collaboration. Although we recognize the interest of looking at the role of the adult (teacher) in designing argumentative activities at school, in this paper we intend to analyze whether the presentation of a task requiring argumentative exchange is taken by children as a useful occasion to start arguing. To attend this goal, we will refer to an interdisciplinary approach, combining the pragma-dialectics and a discursive perspective to analyze the children’s reasoning emerging in the classroom while the teacher is presenting a task. A total of 44 preschool children (3-5 years old) were asked to interact in small groups of two or three people at the kindergarten in order to solve three tasks (to build a tunnel, a bridge and an hourglass – by using different materials) supposed to solicit argumentative exchanges among the participants. The activities were video-recorded and the interactions transcribed. The qualitative analysis implied two steps: the identification of the argumentative structure of each exchange according to the pragmadialectical approach; and the interpretation of the beginning of the argumentative discussions, through a discursive approach. The findings show that, while the teacher is presenting the task and asking participants to solve it, the children already engage themselves in reasoning about some aspects of the activity (e.g., alternative ways to solve the problem, possible use of other tools, etc.). Beyond expectations, children immediately start to argue about the task, advancing their ideas and comparing the possibilities offered by the available objects. As a consequence, the teacher is requested to re-organize the plan, to consider the children’s argumentative attempts, and to arrange the situation in order to pursue the goal and, at the same time, to take into account the children’s interest. As scientists in the field of teacher education, we suggest that teachers should consider not only their need to set out in advance the setting for the activity to be proposed at school, but also the opportunity to look first at what children already do when engaging in interactions. This will allow a better understanding of the relevance of cognitive-oriented argumentative activities in classroom, in which children can immediately enter and develop arguments even before the teacher manages to present the activity. Further studies should contribute to develop these aspects and to train pre- and in-service teachers to consider such a situation, to analyze it and to implement strategies devoted to favor cognitive argumentation at school.

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.

The paper focuses on arguing and reasoning processes occurring at dinnertime family conversations. Our goal is to highlight the interplay between two sides of argumentative practices: the justification as social need to provide evidences for an assertion; the dialogic function of argumentation that refers to the goals arguers want to achieve during discussions. Through the analysis of a case study we discuss a sequence in which a child resists his father’s directive by an elaborated argumentative strategy in order to achieve his goal. Results show how participants engage in opposing the other’s standpoint and are socialized to argumentative dialogues.

The aim of this paper is to analyze how fathers position themselves within their everyday discursive practices at home. We consider the shift from a traditional father figure, defined and perceived as a provider, to an emerging collaborative one in order to explore the discursive acts of fathers’ positioning through the observation of the everyday activities of eight middle-class Italian families. Adopting the positioning theory and the discursive approach as guiding analytical concepts, we discuss how fathers position themselves as representatives and as mediators of the family and of its everyday activities. We propose a qualitative analysis of discursive interactions in order to show how Italian fathers position themselves as active partners in different activities at home, ascribing meanings to what they do with the other family members and with the researchers.

Scientific research in the field of psychology (and especially within the context of mother-child interactions) recognizes the role of reformulations in language learning. The present paper aims to explore to what extent reformulations are intended and used within the context of special need classrooms. We are interested in documenting the use of reformulations in classroom and the related teachers' representations, in order to highlight what are the components that should allow reformulations to be considered useful tools of didactic reflection. We have used participant observation and recordings of students' and teachers' talkin two special need classrooms. In addition, we have administered a questionnaire to teachers in order to collect their representations about the use of reformulations during their teaching activities. Our qualitative analyses highlight aplurality of types and functions of reformulations: auto- and hetero-reformulations, requests of reformulation. In particular, two main aspects appear as salientin the relationship between teachers and students: the function of the reformulation to maintain thecommunication; and the function of offering a resource allowing students to perform an action. The study of thereformulations' representations and of their uses in classroom shows that reformulations are didactic tools and ways to adapt the teacher's language to the pupils' production.

Previous works have investigated argumentative skills of young children referring to the number of arguments and counter-arguments advanced by children as the sole indicator to assess their capacities. Hitherto, less attention has been paid to analyze the strategies adopted by children of different ages in family interactions. This study investigates the argumentative types used by children aged 3–5 and 6–9 years to refute parental eat-directives during mealtime conversations, and whether participants refer to activity-bound/-unbound arguments within the two age groups. To analyze video-recorded meals of Swiss and Italian families, we employed the pragma-dialectical ideal model of critical discussion as tool to examine sequences in which children advance different types of arguments to support their refusal to parental eat-directives. Findings highlight differences and similarities in the two groups of children: mostly, both younger and older children use activity-bound arguments such as quantity and quality of food in response to parental directives; on the contrary, only children aged 6–9 years use activity-unbound arguments (adult-expert opinion and appeal to consistency) to refute the parental eat-directives. Results show how the construction of and engagement in argumentation are embedded in and shape social activities, and how argumentative skills are valued to participate in family interactions.

The increased and stable presence of immigrant children in preschools and in primary schools in Italy in the last twenty years, makes more and more important the study of the attitudes and behaviours in teachers, parents and children. As it is known, attitudes and behaviours can strongly influence school experience (relationships and achievements) of children from native as well as from immigrant families. Several international studies and surveys showed that children from immigrant families are more likely to drop out from school much before getting a diploma or a professional qualification (De Witte, Cabus, Thyssen, Groot, & Maassen van den Brink, 2013; Brunello & Rocco, 2012; Anisef, Brown, Phythian, Sweet, &Walters, 2010). The reason for it can be found in their socio-demographic conditions, their insufficient knowledge of the host country language and the inadequacy of educational policies for immigrants. Furthermore, the co-existence in the same school of immigrant children and autochthone children creating a constant intercultural and interethnic contact puts forward the need to handle prejudice development, in view of the social integration of the immigrant children. In this paper we present a study exploring the relationship between personality, educational style and prejudice of parents in native and in immigrant families regarding immigrant children's social integration. Results show important relations among these parents’ characteristics, together with differences between native and immigrant families. These findings could provide a contribution in implementing adequate intervention programmes supporting the school integration of immigrant children.

The aim of this chapter is to consider the intertwining of social and cognitive aspects of learning through interactive activities, in order to explore how the two aspects are interrelated in children’s joint work. Focusing on participants’ talk while they are asked to solve together a reading comprehension task and to agree on a joint answer, we highlight the ways in which the process of dialogical construction of a common answer is influenced by social and cognitive factors. In particular, we problematize the interplay of multiple aspects (cognitive, personal, interpersonal) that structure interactions among peers in order to focus on the regulation of social relations during children’s discussions and its interplay with cognitive dimensions of joint task solving. We show how solving reading comprehension tasks through peer interactions appears as a complex and dynamic phenomenon shaped by the interplay of cognitive, social and personal aspects.

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.

This paper sets out to investigate the issues leading parents to engage in argumentative discussions with their children during mealtimes. Within a data corpus of 30 video-recorded meals of 10 middle to upper-middle-class Swiss and Italian families with a high socio-cultural level, 107 argumentative discussions between parents and children aged from 3 to 9 years old were selected. The approach for the analysis is based on the pragma-dialectical ideal model of a critical discussion. The results show that family argumentative discussions unfold around issues that are generated both by parental prescriptions and by children’s requests. The parental prescriptions largely concern context-bound activities such as having to eat a certain food or the teaching of correct table manners. The issues triggered by children’s requests refer to a wide range of activities, mainly related to the activity of mealtimes but also related to the children’s behavior outside the family context. These results indicate that argumentative interactions between parents and children are not mere conflictual episodes that must be avoided, but they essentially have a broader educational function.

Questions represent a crucial tool of interaction between parents and children from a very early age. This study aims to investigate which function – argumentative or explanatory – most characterizes Why-questions asked by children to their parents in a natural setting such as mealtimes at home. Why-questions asked by 13 children – eight girls and five boys aged between three and seven years – coming from 10 middle- to upper-middle-class Swiss and Italian families with a high socio-cultural level were analyzed. In the corpus, the explanatory function largely characterizes children’s Why-questions. Questions we observed play fundamentally an educational role, since they favor the acquisition of new information and the transmission from parents to children of parental behavioral models (social behavior). The argumentative Why-questions, less frequently asked by children in our sample, are also important from an educational point of view. By these questions children challenge their parents to make clear the reasons behind their opinions, suggestions, rules and prescriptions, which are often largely implicit. Altogether, the results of this study indicate that both the explanatory and argumentative types of children’s Why-questions have a knowledge-seeking function, that is, children asking such questions are seeking knowledge of something.

At mealtimes, the evaluation of the appropriate (or not appropriate) behavior concerning the food is often assumed as a topic of discourse. The aim of this study is to single out the argumentative strategies used by parents with their children and by children with their parents in order to convince the other party to eat or not to eat a certain food. Within a data corpus constituted by 30 video-recorded meals of 10 middle to upper-middle-class Swiss and Italian families, we selected a corpus of 77 argumentative discussions between parents and children arisen around a food-related issue. Data are presented through discursive excerpts of argumentative discussions that were found within the data corpus and analyzed through the pragma-dialectical model of critical discussion. The results of this study show that the feeding practices in families with young children during mealtimes are argumentatively co- constructed by participants. In most cases parents put forward arguments based on the quality (e.g., very good, nutritious, salty, or not good) and quantity (e.g., too little, quite enough, or too much) of food to convince their children to eat. Similarly, children put forward arguments based on the quality and quantity of food to convince their parents to change their standpoint, although their view on the issue is the opposite of that of their parents.