Negotiating entry (Cromdal, 2001)

Cromdal, J. (2001) ‘Can I be with?’: Negotiating play entry in a bilingual school. Journal of Pragmatics, 33(4), 515-453.

 Rather than focusing on access strategies, in this paper Jacob Cromdal investigates how children negotiate play entry as a collaborative process. Cromdal provides a concise review of existing studies of most successful tactics, from low-risk (‘eg. copying the ongoing activity or producing group-oriented expressions’ (p.517) to high-risk (‘eg. attention getting or behaviours disrupting the ongoing activity’ p. 517) for gaining entry into ongoing play. In his own data, though, he is able to show that the effective use of strategies and resources (in this case language shift between English and Swedish) depends on the contingient uptake and adaptation of the ongoing, co-constructed activity.  Cromdal also points out that only do we need to talke into account the collaborative nature of these processes, but that the context of play itself plays some role (ie pretty much anyone can get access to turn the skipping rope, as the jumping is the desired activity). Furthermore, ‘we may think of bilingualism as a feature of discourse, displayable only through participants’ situated actions. Bilingual displays, like any other actions, may then become relevant for the ensuing interaction. For example, they may be exploited by interactants for various ends, such as forming alliances or building oppositions, suggesting that bilingualism may be seen as a socially distrib- uted interactional resource. Accordingly, as the empirical illustrations of these points have suggested, there are various ways of “doing bilingual negotiation”.’ (p.540)