Talk and Interaction Among Children and the Co-Construction of Peer Groups and Peer Culture

According to recent interpretive approaches to the study of children's socialization, meaning creation is an active process by which children playfully transform and actively resist cultural categories, and where language is viewed as social action that helps shape reality (Gaskins et al. 1992). Four ways in which children's peer talk establishes and maintains peer culture are considered: (a) how children elaborate games and codes (and ritualize the basis of inclusion in the peer group) through peer talk, (b) how conflict talk functions to elaborate peer culture, (c) how identities as peer group phenomena are talked into being through peer talk, and (d) how adult culture is resisted through peer talk. Agentive goals of children's peer culture, and the role of language in achieving them, are discussed in each section. I conclude that sociolinguistics gives researchers a way to think about social competence as sets of linguistic practices (e.g., positionings, voicings, participation framework manipulations) that children enact.