Introduction

As other contributors to this volume have shown, children's communications are often misheard or unheard. One reason is that in many settings children are powerless to make themselves heard. Another is that adults do not have sufficient understanding of how children communicate. For example, young children are active participants in constructing their own social worlds, yet adults may impinge on this process without a full understanding of how children go about creating rule-governed environments in which they are capable agents. This chapter shows how conversation analysis can be a tool for understanding how children communicate and engage, how they deal with conflict and how adults can support their autonomy rather than undermine it.

Children's arguments are a productive site for researchers to investigate children's competencies and this chapter explores how young children resolve verbal disputes with peers. Examples of spontaneous arguments between four-year-old children illustrate that although disputes are not always resolved, there are three very distinct possible outcomes: resolution, abandonment and teacher intervention. Conversation analysis of these three dispute ‘closings’ reveals that very specific linguistic resources are used by young children to manage disagreements with peers. Linguistic research shows us that we go about responding to other speakers in very particular ways. Preference organisation is a concept which explains that responses – to requests, invitations and so on – are normally performed in one of two ways (preferred or dispreferred) and that these ‘turn shapes’ are marked consistently throughout all types of discourse. This concept of preference is introduced later in the chapter, but is brought to the reader's attention here as it proves to be a governing principle in young children's disputes with peers.

It stands to reason that once an argument has begun there are only two possible outcomes: continuation or dissipation. In other words, once children have engaged in verbal conflict, the only alternatives are to sustain the dispute or to arrive at some sort of ending. It is the closing of disputes that is of particular interest here, because the continuation of conflict is essentially defined by the absence of a conclusion. Throughout this chapter, an analysis of closings in children's spontaneous peer disputes is documented, namely by distinguishing three possible closings: resolution, abandonment and teacher intervention.