Taking an Interactional Perspective: Examining Children's Talk in the Australian Aboriginal Community of Yakanarra

Abstract

Understanding how children of different ages and different cultures design and organize their talk allows us to better understand how children demonstrate intersubjectivity, how they structure their social world, and how they orient to social and cultural practices. Although researchers are beginning to re-examine interactionally some of the previous observational claims concerning adult Aboriginal conversational style, less focus has been given to Indigenous children's interactional style. Previous observational claims concerning Aboriginal conversational style include increased toleration of silence, increased occurrence of interruptions, reluctance to respond to questions, and the tendency to enter a conversation without attending to the talk of others. One of the aims of the paper is to examine instances of children's interaction against the backdrop of these observations concerning Aboriginal adult conversation style in order to understand how Indigenous children interact with others within the multilingual environment in which they find themselves. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, the paper analyses the talk of two children from Yakanarra in order to show (a) how the children under analysis responded to a request to do something, and the sorts of techniques used to mobilize such a response; and (b) how the children monitored the surrounding adults' talk occurring within the same interactional space. The analysis, presented against the backdrop of what has been observed to date concerning adult Indigenous conversational style, demonstrates the importance of examining the detail of talk, taking all aspects into account (including prosody, pauses, overlap), in order to understand how two Indigenous children living in Yakanarra interact within their social and cultural worlds.