Forging friendships (Bateman, 2012)

Bateman, A. (2012) Forging friendships: The use of collective pro-terms by pre-school children. Discourse Studies, 14(2),165-180.

Amanda paper provides a review of the beneficial (social support) and challenging (shifting status) elements of friendship, where there is an overwhelming positive for school engagement and peer interactions (ie children with friends do better at both). Rather than seeing friendship as a dichotomy (have/have not), Bateman advocates for investigating how relationships are managed – as all children have the capacity for friendship – so the practices that sustain peer relationships are of interest here. Specifically, this paper illustrates four-year-old children’s use of the collective pro-term (Sacks, 1995) ‘we’ as a method for soliciting affiliation and marking inclusion, or as a resource to exclude others from ‘our’ play.