Participation in multilingual preschool play: Shadowing and crossing as interactional resources

The present paper explores how children participate in peer play activities in a multilingual preschool setting. Participation is understood as a practical achievement in social interaction. Through in-depth analyses of video recordings of peer play, the study demonstrates how the children artfully exploit a range of multimodal resources in play activities. Of special interest are: the children's coordination of nonvocal actions with talk; and: how such complex action types are produced to accomplish and sustain participation in multi-party play. The analyses highlight two interactional phenomena of interest for our understanding of the children's conduct, namely ‘shadowing’ and ‘crossing’. Shadowing refers to the carefully tailored delivery of an action, which repeats an immediately preceding move of another participant. Crossing (Rampton, 1995) relates to a specific instance of language alternation, through which participants align with and make use of their interlocutors’ linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. It is shown how these different types of verbal as well as nonvocal resources are intertwined, sequentially organized and collaboratively deployed in children's construction of locally accountable actions.