"Discussione" and Friendship: Socialization Processes in the Peer Culture of Italian Nursery School Children.

This paper addresses the lack of theoretical work on young children in sociology by presenting an interpretive approach to childhood socialization. This approach extends traditional views of human development by demonstrating that socialization is a collective process that occurs in a social, rather than in a private, realm. To illustrate the interpretive approach, we present a multilayered analysis of two phases of a lengthy verbal routine discussionn) among Italian nursery school children. The analysis demonstrates how (1) the routine of discussion is produced sociolinguistically; (2) the production of the routine builds on and extends shared knowledge basic to peer culture; and (3) the children, in the course of producing the routine, attempt to deal with aspects of the world they do not fully grasp and, thereby, move closer toward appropriating certain elements of the adult culture.

[1]  J. Wertsch.  The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology , 1981 .

[2]  W. Corsaro,et al.  Friendship and peer culture in the early years , 1985 .

[3]  R. Selman.  growth of interpersonal understanding , 1980 .

[4]  E. Goffman,et al.  Forms of talk , 1982 .

[5]  R. Merton.  Social Theory and Social Structure , 1958 .

[6]  A. Giddens.  The Constitution of Society , 1985 .

[7]  J. Bruner.  Actual minds, possible worlds , 1985 .

[8]  R. Testa.  Interruptive strategies in English and Italian conversation: smooth versus contrastive linguistic preferences , 1988 .

[9]  C. Geertz,et al.  The Interpretation of Cultures , 1973 .

[10]  G. P. Stone.  The Play Of Little Children , 1965 .

[11]  J. Youniss.  Parents and Peers in Social Development: A Sullivan-Piaget Perspective , 1980 .

[12]  W. Corsaro,et al.  Something Old and Something New , 1982 .

[13]  D. Maynard.  On The Functions of Social Conflict among Children. , 1985 .

[14]  Elinor Ochs.  Talking to children in Western Samoa , 1982, Language in Society.

[15]  Elliot Turiel,et al.  The development of social knowledge , 1983 .

[16]  P. Willis.  Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs , 1976 .

[17]  William Damon,et al.  The social world of the child , 1977 .

[18]  Jürgen Streeck,et al.  Children's Worlds and Children's Language , 1986 .

[19]  C. Saraceno.  The Social Construction of Childhood: Child Care and Education Policies in Italy and the United States , 1984 .