When education seeps into ‘free play’: How preschool children accomplish multilingual education

In this article, we examine how bilingual preschoolers enact, in the course of ‘free play’, previous experiences from second language instructional activities. In so doing, the participants transform a set of educational routines for their own purposes within the current activity. Hence, apart from merely drawing on multilingual interactional resources, participation in such activities allows children to exploit some normative features of educational practice. The interactional organization of these events is explicated sequentially, examining in some analytic detail the children's methods for invoking, repairing and acting upon educational routines and practices within non-instructional activities. The analyses are discussed in terms of children's understanding and production of institutional order(s) in and through mundane interaction.