Asta Cekaite
Biographic Data
| ID | 659229 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Asta Cekaite |
| GIVEN NAMES | Asta |
| FAMILY NAME | Cekaite |
| SIGNATURE | CEKAITE A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Linköping University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4580-3002 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 413 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Environmental noticings on the move: Interactional affordances and children’s engagement during preschool walks
This paper examines how preschool children and teachers engage in environmental noticings of mundane phenomena (e.g., bird, spider web) during group walks outdoors. Drawing on over 100 hours of audiovisual recordings from preschools in Sweden and Japan, it uses multimodal conversation analysis to examine how such noticings are accomplished through talk, gesture, and movement. Rather than treating noticing as an internal cognitive process, we conc…
“I hope that it comes across to the children that I am there as a human being”: Teachers’ embodiment in the digital era
Although teachers’ work is embodied, embodiment has not been widely discussed with reference to teachers’ work or teacher education. The digital era has changed teachers’ work in many ways, including their embodiment, as digital technologies are part of everyday life in schools. Hence, teachers’ embodiment in the digital era requires critical reflection. This study contributes to this reflection in three ways. First, we explore teachers’ embodime…
Shepherding the emotion: Embodied socialization of emotion in pediatric dental interactions
In this study, we use video analysis of embodied interactions to examine the emergence of what we term emotion socialization choreographies —structured, embodied interactions that shape a patient's emotional displays and experiences. Our data comprise video recordings of authentic interactions from Chinese and Finnish pediatric appointments, involving patients aged six to 12 years, their caregiver(s), and healthcare professionals. We focus on the…
Embodied framing, playfulness and touch in adult-child interactions
Everyday poetics and language play in young children’s interactions in a bilingual institutional context
The study examines young children’s peer group interactions characterized by creative language use. We operationalize the concept of everyday poetics to explore the forms, heteroglossic resources, and the social and aesthetic purposes of children’s peer encounters. The data consists of video ethnography conduced in a bilingual Swedish-English preschool for children aged 1–5 in Sweden. Using multimodal conversation analysis, the study shows that e…
Joint waking activity in early childhood education as a collaborative configuration of care
An exploratory study of children’s peer touch in a Swedish preschool: Touch forms, bodily arrangements, and social constellations
This study explores children’s peer touch in a Swedish preschool using video observations. Two main aspects of children’s touch in focus: (1) to what extent do children use touch within the peer group and with whom and (2) in what ways do children touch each other (i.e. what touch forms are used and what areas of other children’s bodies are touched). Data consists of 10 hours of video recordings, featuring 35 children aged 1–5 years. The results …
Uses of interpersonal touch in educational settings: Organizing social relations, participation, and learning
Touch as a resource when initiating joint activities in children’s peer interactions
This video-ethnographic study explores preschool children’s ways of engaging in joint activities using touch, i.e., various types of physical contact. Focusing on how children (2–5 years old) in preschools in Sweden manage peer group activities, the study examines the ways in which physical contact features in children’s activity proposals and other actions that are aimed at including participants in a joint activity. It explores some of the dive…
Social and Emotional Functions of Institutional Touch in the Relational Care of Young Children
This study reports results concerning close embodied practices, involving touch, in early childhood care settings in Sweden during the COVID‐19 pandemic. The data—video recordings of everyday practices in contexts of childcare—were collected during various phases of the pandemic. The study demonstrates a broad range of uses of touch, by adults and children themselves in various age groups and for various social purposes. Touch as embodied intimac…
How assisted eating becomes a caring practice in institutional settings: Embodied gestures and stages of assisted eating
Assisted eating is a basic caring practice and the means through which many individuals receive adequate nutrition. Research in this area has noted the challenges of helping others to eat while upholding their independence, though has yet to explicate how this caring practice is achieved in detail and across the lifespan. This paper provides an empirical analysis of assisted eating episodes in two different institutions, detailing the processes t…
Child Pragmatic Development
Child pragmatic development involves children's acquisition of communicative competences, that is, learning how to use language, in order to understand and communicate with others appropriately in an expanding range of social contexts. The aim of this entry is to describe the main research perspectives on child pragmatic development, introduce the areas and methods of their inquiry, and review their findings. The entry discusses research on child…
Convergence of control and affection in classroom management: Affectionate and disciplining touch and talk
Child-initiated informings and conversational participation in a bilingual preschool
This paper explores children's interactional competence in the context of bilingual early childhood education, looking specifically at how very young children initiate conversations with teachers by informing them about something interesting and new. Video recordings collected from ethnographic fieldwork in a Swedish–English preschool are investigated from the conversation analytic perspective, paying particular attention to multimodal aspects of…
Trajectories of love: Affective reciprocity during kissing in the everyday life of romantic couples
This study inspects the interactional emergence of affective reciprocity-the mutual exchange of affection-in the everyday life of romantic couples in their homes. It utilizes video analysis of naturally occurring interactions to uncover how affective reciprocity is accomplished in and through trajectories of love or interaction trajectories ending up in kissing or touching in an affectionate manner. A detailed empirical analysis demonstrates that…
Assessing and assisting prospective adoptive parents: Social workers’ communicative strategies in adoption assessment interviews
The assessment of prospective adoptive parents is a complex task for professional social workers. In this study, we examine the structure and function of professional social workers’ follow-up questions in assessment talk with adoption applicants. The analysis shows that adoption assessment through interviews involved a delicate and complex task that was accomplished by using a particular genre of institutional talk. This both invited the applica…
Practices of peer inclusion
This paper explores children’s practices of social inclusion by focusing on their recruitment of peers into play activities. Utilizing data of naturally occurring interaction in Swedish and Japanese preschools, it details four episodes in which children deployed multimodal resources in recruiting peers to begin or join play. The analysis reveals how children can lay the groundwork for recruitments through pre-sequences aimed at securing peer atte…
Schwedis’ he can’t even say Swedish” - subverting and reproducing institutionalized norms for language use in multilingual peer groups
The present study explores how minority schoolchildren in multilingual peer group interactions act upon dominant educational and linguistic ideologies as they organize their everyday emerging peer culture. The data draw from ethnographies combined with detailed analysis (CA) of video recordings in two primary monolingual school settings in Sweden. Bakhtin’s processual view of how linguistic norms are used for overcoming the heteroglossia of langu…
Calibrating joint attention and affective stances in young children's peer interactions
The present study addresses young childrens (three-to five-year-olds) peer interactions and explores a recurrent interactional genre, i.e. childrens affectively heightened attention-organizing practices used when initiating an exchange in preschool interactions in Sweden. The data consists of 40 h of video recordings collected in two regular pre-schools in Sweden. By using Multimodal Interaction Analysis (Goodwin, 2000) of video -recordings from …
Emotion socialization – compassion or non-engagement – in young children's responses to peer distress
Taking its point of departure from sociocultural perspectives, the present study examines 2–3-year-old children's responses to peers' crying in a regular Swedish preschool. By analyzing video recordings of the children's everyday activities and frequent situations of crying in peer play conflicts, the study identifies the broad range of children's responses to peer distress. Children's orientation towards a crying peer is discussed in relation to…
Transcription notation
Pragmatics of crying in adult-child interactions: Introduction to special issue
Crying and crying responses: A comparative exploration of pragmatic socialization in a Swedish and Japanese preschool
This paper explores pragmatic socialization by examining episodes of two to three - year-old children’s crying and adults’ responses to this crying in two preschools: Sweden and Japan. Based on approximately 100 hours of naturally occurring interactions, it focuses on crying episodes that emerged within peer conflict, and analyzes ways that teachers structured a triadic framework of mediation. The results show how teachers mediated by using (1) q…
Enacting sabotage in siblings' conflicts: Desired objects and deceptive bodies
The present study examines sibling' conflict trajectories with a specific focus on acts of sabotage - deliberate obstruction or destruction of activities with an object. Multimodal interaction analysis is used to understand how siblings' conflicts are organised through multiple (verbal and embodied) practices. We further draw on childhood studies that focuses on children's material practices and use the term enactment to better understand human-n…
Touch and Social Interaction
Our understanding of touch as a basic and complex sense is informed by phenomenological perspectives on our corporeal "being-in-the-world" and the notion of intercorporeality ( Merleau-Ponty 1964 ) as well as by sociological perspectives on social life as organized and accomplished through corporeal participation and the interaction order ( Goffman 1983 ). Intercorporeality involves sense-making of oneself and copresent others as body subjects, a…
Calibration in directive/response sequences in family interaction
Shepherding the child: Embodied Directive Sequences in Parent-Child Interactions
The present study explores how directives are constituted in and through situated verbal, bodily, and spatial practices. The foci are parental directives requesting routine family tasks to be carried out in an immediate situational context and necessitating the child's locomotion from one place to another (e.g., to take a bath, brush his/her teeth). As documented, such directive sequences were designed with what is here called parental shepherdin…
Activity contracts and directives in everyday family politics
In theorizing on family life, children’s agency is a feature of a modern type of family, marked by free choice and inter-generational negotiations rather than parental authority. A video ethnography of Swedish everyday family life documents directive sequences and inter-generational negotiations, including what is here called activity contracts: agreements that form a type of inter-generational account work around target activities (e.g. cleaning…
Language Play, a Collaborative Resource in Children's L2 learning
Within communicative language teaching, 'natural' language has had a privileged position, and a focus on form has been seen as something inauthentic or as something that is inconsequential for learning (for a critique, see Kramsch and Sullivan 1996; Cook 1997). Yet in the present study of an immersion classroom, it was found that children with limited L2 proficiency recurrently employed form-focused language play in spontaneous peer conversations…
The Coordination of Talk and Touch in Adults’ Directives to Children: Touch and Social Control
Adults sometimes accompany the directives they issue to children about their actions and movements with bodily contact (for example, shoving, guiding, or pushing). This article explores the interactional uses and meanings of such combinations of spoken directive and bodily contact that involves touch in data from families and primary educational settings in Sweden. The focus is on how the timing and coordination of haptics (communicative acts of …
The Comforting Touch: Tactile Intimacy and Talk in Managing Children’s Distress
The present study examines young childrens distress management in situ, focusing on situations of crying and caregivers embodiedhapticsoothing responses in preschools in Sweden. The adults responses to crying involve embraces, stroking, and patting. Haptic soothing is managed by calibrating the bodily proximity and postural orientations between the participants, including hapticembracing or face-to-faceformations that are coordinated with particu…
Touch as social control: Haptic organization of attention in adult-child interactions
Staging Linguistic Identities and Negotiating Monolingual Norms in Multiethnic School Settings
This article focuses on children's language alternation practices in two primary school settings. More specifically we explore how participants (children and teachers) in episodes of language alternation invoke linguistic and social identities, thereby 'talking into being' language and educational ideologies. The present study is based on multi-sited ethnography in two multiethnic educational settings where classroom activities are primarily in S…
Repetition and Joking in Children’s Second Language Conversations: Playful Recyclings in an Immersion Classroom
Repetition is often associated with traditional teaching drills. However, it has been documented how repetitions are exploited by learners themselves (Duff, 2000). In a study of immersion classroom conversations, it was found that playful recyclings were recurrent features of young learners’ second language repertoires. Such joking events were identified on the basis of the participants’ displayed amusement, and they often involved activity-based…
Language Maintenance in a Multilingual Family: Informal Heritage Language Lessons in Parent–Child Interactions
The present study explores language socialization patterns in a Persian-Kurdish family in Sweden and examines how “one-parent, one-language” family language policies are instantiated and negotiated in parent–child interactions. The data consist of video-recordings and ethnographic observations of family interactions, as well as interviews. Detailed interactional analysis is employed to investigate parental language maintenance efforts and the chi…
Stance and footing in multilingual play: Rescaling practices and heritage language use in a Swedish preschool
Affective stances in teacher-novice student interactions: Language, embodiment, and willingness to learn in a Swedish primary classroom
The present study explores a child, language, and cultural novice's affective and moral socialization during her first year in a Swedish first-grade classroom. Within the language socialization framework, it focuses on the lexicogrammatical and embodied organization of the novice's affectively charged noncompliant responses to (teacher) instructional directives, and the teachers' socializing responsive moves (contextualizing them within local and…
Language policies in play: Learning ecologies in multilingual preschool interactions among peers and teachers
In this study we argue that a focus on language learning ecologies, that is, situations for participation in various communicative practices, can shed light on the intricate processes through which minority children develop or are constrained from acquiring cultural and linguistic competencies (here, of a majority language). The analysis draws on a language socialization approach to examine the micro-level contexts of an immigrant child’s prescho…
Crying and crying responses: A comparative exploration of pragmatic socialization in a Swedish and Japanese preschool
This paper explores pragmatic socialization by examining episodes of two to three - year-old children’s crying and adults’ responses to this crying in two preschools: Sweden and Japan. Based on approximately 100 hours of naturally occurring interactions, it focuses on crying episodes that emerged within peer conflict, and analyzes ways that teachers structured a triadic framework of mediation. The results show how teachers mediated by using (1) q…
Touch and Social Interaction
Our understanding of touch as a basic and complex sense is informed by phenomenological perspectives on our corporeal "being-in-the-world" and the notion of intercorporeality ( Merleau-Ponty 1964 ) as well as by sociological perspectives on social life as organized and accomplished through corporeal participation and the interaction order ( Goffman 1983 ). Intercorporeality involves sense-making of oneself and copresent others as body subjects, a…
Trajectories of love: Affective reciprocity during kissing in the everyday life of romantic couples
This study inspects the interactional emergence of affective reciprocity-the mutual exchange of affection-in the everyday life of romantic couples in their homes. It utilizes video analysis of naturally occurring interactions to uncover how affective reciprocity is accomplished in and through trajectories of love or interaction trajectories ending up in kissing or touching in an affectionate manner. A detailed empirical analysis demonstrates that…
Calibrating joint attention and affective stances in young children's peer interactions
The present study addresses young childrens (three-to five-year-olds) peer interactions and explores a recurrent interactional genre, i.e. childrens affectively heightened attention-organizing practices used when initiating an exchange in preschool interactions in Sweden. The data consists of 40 h of video recordings collected in two regular pre-schools in Sweden. By using Multimodal Interaction Analysis (Goodwin, 2000) of video -recordings from …
Microgenesis of language creativity: Innovation, conformity and incongruence in children's language play
How assisted eating becomes a caring practice in institutional settings: Embodied gestures and stages of assisted eating
Assisted eating is a basic caring practice and the means through which many individuals receive adequate nutrition. Research in this area has noted the challenges of helping others to eat while upholding their independence, though has yet to explicate how this caring practice is achieved in detail and across the lifespan. This paper provides an empirical analysis of assisted eating episodes in two different institutions, detailing the processes t…
Enacting sabotage in siblings' conflicts: Desired objects and deceptive bodies
The present study examines sibling' conflict trajectories with a specific focus on acts of sabotage - deliberate obstruction or destruction of activities with an object. Multimodal interaction analysis is used to understand how siblings' conflicts are organised through multiple (verbal and embodied) practices. We further draw on childhood studies that focuses on children's material practices and use the term enactment to better understand human-n…
Child Pragmatic Development
Language is a tool that children and adults use to act in and explore the social world; to create, develop, and sustain social relationships; and to engage with others in culturally meaningful activities. Thus, pragmatic development involves children's acquisition of communicative competences, that is, learning how to use language, to communicate and understand others appropriately and effectively in a widening range of social contexts and activi…
Joint waking activity in early childhood education as a collaborative configuration of care
Repetition and Joking in Children’s Second Language Conversations: Playful Recyclings in an Immersion Classroom
Repetition is often associated with traditional teaching drills. However, it has been documented how repetitions are exploited by learners themselves (Duff, 2000). In a study of immersion classroom conversations, it was found that playful recyclings were recurrent features of young learners’ second language repertoires. Such joking events were identified on the basis of the participants’ displayed amusement, and they often involved activity-based…
Language Play, a Collaborative Resource in Children's L2 learning
Within communicative language teaching, 'natural' language has had a privileged position, and a focus on form has been seen as something inauthentic or as something that is inconsequential for learning (for a critique, see Kramsch and Sullivan 1996; Cook 1997). Yet in the present study of an immersion classroom, it was found that children with limited L2 proficiency recurrently employed form-focused language play in spontaneous peer conversations…
Maya Hickmann , Children's discourse: Person, space and time across languages
Maya Hickmann , Children's discourse: Person, space and time across languages . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp.vii, 392. Hb $55. This monograph explores the universality and variability of the language acquisition processes. Arguing that universal learning mechanisms, on the one hand, or innate capacities within specific domains, on the other, are incomplete as theoretical explanations, this book addresses two major questions reg…
A Child's Development of Interactional Competence in a Swedish L2 Classroom
This study explores a child's emergent second language (L2) interactional competence during her first year in a Swedish immersion classroom. Within the theoretical framework of situated learning, it focuses on how she acquires expertise in a specific classroom practice: multiparty classroom talk. The data cover three periods (the early, middle, and late phases) of her first school year. The methods adopted combine a microanalytic approach with et…
Soliciting Teacher Attention in an L2 Classroom: Affect Displays, Classroom Artefacts, and Embodied Action
This paper explores L2 novices’ ways of soliciting teacher attention, more specifically, their summonses. The data are based on detailed analyses of video recordings in a Swedish language immersion classroom. The analyses illuminate the lexical shape of summonses in conjunction with prosody, body posture, gestures, and classroom artefacts. As demonstrated, a simple structure of summoning provided a handy method for soliciting and establishing the…
Staging Linguistic Identities and Negotiating Monolingual Norms in Multiethnic School Settings
This article focuses on children's language alternation practices in two primary school settings. More specifically we explore how participants (children and teachers) in episodes of language alternation invoke linguistic and social identities, thereby 'talking into being' language and educational ideologies. The present study is based on multi-sited ethnography in two multiethnic educational settings where classroom activities are primarily in S…
Shepherding the child: Embodied Directive Sequences in Parent-Child Interactions
The present study explores how directives are constituted in and through situated verbal, bodily, and spatial practices. The foci are parental directives requesting routine family tasks to be carried out in an immediate situational context and necessitating the child's locomotion from one place to another (e.g., to take a bath, brush his/her teeth). As documented, such directive sequences were designed with what is here called parental shepherdin…
Activity contracts and directives in everyday family politics
In theorizing on family life, children’s agency is a feature of a modern type of family, marked by free choice and inter-generational negotiations rather than parental authority. A video ethnography of Swedish everyday family life documents directive sequences and inter-generational negotiations, including what is here called activity contracts: agreements that form a type of inter-generational account work around target activities (e.g. cleaning…
Emotion as Stance
This chapter argues that emotion is organized as interactive practice, rather than as the expression of experience that has its primary locus in the private life of the individual. Analytically this means that the displays of emotion performed by an individual must be analyzed in reference to not only her own body but also the bodies of those with whom she is organizing action. Emotions constitute ways of taking up highly consequential affective …
Calibration in directive/response sequences in family interaction
Child Pragmatic Development
Language is a tool that children and adults use to act in and explore the social world; to create, develop, and sustain social relationships; and to engage with others in culturally meaningful activities. Thus, pragmatic development involves children's acquisition of communicative competences, that is, learning how to use language, to communicate and understand others appropriately and effectively in a widening range of social contexts and activi…
Affective stances in teacher-novice student interactions: Language, embodiment, and willingness to learn in a Swedish primary classroom
The present study explores a child, language, and cultural novice's affective and moral socialization during her first year in a Swedish first-grade classroom. Within the language socialization framework, it focuses on the lexicogrammatical and embodied organization of the novice's affectively charged noncompliant responses to (teacher) instructional directives, and the teachers' socializing responsive moves (contextualizing them within local and…
Peer group interactions in multilingual educational settings: Co-constructing social order and norms for language use
The present study explores peer group interactions in early multilingual educational settings, specifically focusing on children’s language-related episodes. Highlighting the multifaceted work of these interactional practices, it demonstrates in detail how children’s corrective actions, targeting, assessing and criticizing of the other’s language use were utilized in building the peer group identities and relations, while simultaneously indexing …
The Coordination of Talk and Touch in Adults’ Directives to Children: Touch and Social Control
Adults sometimes accompany the directives they issue to children about their actions and movements with bodily contact (for example, shoving, guiding, or pushing). This article explores the interactional uses and meanings of such combinations of spoken directive and bodily contact that involves touch in data from families and primary educational settings in Sweden. The focus is on how the timing and coordination of haptics (communicative acts of …
Language Maintenance in a Multilingual Family: Informal Heritage Language Lessons in Parent–Child Interactions
The present study explores language socialization patterns in a Persian-Kurdish family in Sweden and examines how “one-parent, one-language” family language policies are instantiated and negotiated in parent–child interactions. The data consist of video-recordings and ethnographic observations of family interactions, as well as interviews. Detailed interactional analysis is employed to investigate parental language maintenance efforts and the chi…
Touch as social control: Haptic organization of attention in adult-child interactions
The Comforting Touch: Tactile Intimacy and Talk in Managing Children’s Distress
The present study examines young childrens distress management in situ, focusing on situations of crying and caregivers embodiedhapticsoothing responses in preschools in Sweden. The adults responses to crying involve embraces, stroking, and patting. Haptic soothing is managed by calibrating the bodily proximity and postural orientations between the participants, including hapticembracing or face-to-faceformations that are coordinated with particu…
Language policies in play: Learning ecologies in multilingual preschool interactions among peers and teachers
In this study we argue that a focus on language learning ecologies, that is, situations for participation in various communicative practices, can shed light on the intricate processes through which minority children develop or are constrained from acquiring cultural and linguistic competencies (here, of a majority language). The analysis draws on a language socialization approach to examine the micro-level contexts of an immigrant child’s prescho…
Embodied Family Choreography: Practices of Control, Care, and Mundane Creativity
Embodied Family Choreography documents the lived and embodied practices employed to establish, maintain, and negotiate intimate social relationships in the family, examining forms of control, care, and creativity. Making use of the extensive video archives of family interaction in the US and Sweden, it presents the first investigation of how touch and interaction between bodies, in conjunction with talk, constitute a primary means of orchestratin…
Siblings as Language Socialization Agents in Bilingual Families
The present study examines the siblings’ contribution to shaping the language practices and language environment of immigrant families. The data consist of interviews, observations, and video recordings of everyday family interactions and sibling play in five Iranian families residing in Sweden. Detailed interaction analyses show that siblings targeted various aspects of each other’s language use (heritage languages, Swedish, and English). They c…
Microgenesis of language creativity: Innovation, conformity and incongruence in children's language play
Stance and footing in multilingual play: Rescaling practices and heritage language use in a Swedish preschool
Triadic conflict mediation as socialization into perspective taking in Swedish preschools
This paper is a video-ethnographic language socialization study that examines the discursive, linguistic and embodied features of the teachers’ and children's ways of conflict mediation and resolution. The study describes the ways in which young children (three to five-year olds) in several preschools in Sweden are being socialized into the interactional competences and perspective taking necessary for managing conflict situations. It is shown th…
Subversive compliance and embodiment in remedial interchanges
This study examines normativity of affect and the affective embeddedness of normativity, instantiated as verbal and embodied stances taken by the participants in adult-child remedial interchanges. The data are based on one year of video fieldwork in a first-grade class at a Swedish primary school. An ethnographically informed analysis of talk and multimodal action is adopted. The findings show that the children’s affective and normative transgres…
The moral character of emotion work in adult-child interactions
This special issue furthers a view in which affective stances are seen as indexical of culturally specific structures of feeling and norms concerning what counts as appropriate conduct in particular settings. The link between affect and everyday morality in the development and negotiations of moral personhood, identities and character work is demonstrated in the empirical studies that examine how affective stances are mobilized by drawing social …
Psychology (41 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (37 works) · Social Psychology (26 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Developmental psychology (19 works) · Linguistics (17 works) · Pedagogy (14 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning (13 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (13 works)