Guiding Children to Respond: Prioritizing Children’s Participation Over Interaction Progression

ABSTRACT When adults select young children to answer questions, children’s delays and troubles in responding may lead to a tension between child participation and the preference for progressivity that normally applies to conversations among adults. Drawing on everyday adult-child conversational data, this study focuses on question-answer sequences in which the selected child does not respond in a timely or adequate manner and examines how co-present, nonselected adults balance between progressivity and the need to facilitate child participation. The analysis shows that adults tend to manage this balance by prioritizing child participation over progressivity, thereby socializing children to achieve interactional autonomy. This ordering of preferences in adult-child interaction is in contrast with previous findings in adult conversation. This study provides empirical evidence of the ways adults prioritize child participation and socialize children into active responsive participation in conversation. Data are in Mandarin and English.