Directing, negotiating and planning: 'Aus Spiel' ('for play') in children's pretend joint play

Artikel

We are interested in how children organize joint pretend play. In this kind of play, children create an invented world by transforming matters of the real world into matters of a fictional world (e.g., pretending to be a 'giant' or treating a particular spatial area as a 'witch's kitchen'). Since there are no rules and no script, every next step in the game is an improvisation designed here and now. Children engaged in free play have equal rights to determine what should happen next. For that reason, they have to negotiate next steps. We are interested in a particular expression that children often use in joint play: aus Spaß/Spiel ('for fun' or 'for play', similar to 'let's pretend'). Based on a corpus of five hours of video recordings of two pairs of twins (the younger children are between 3 and 5 years old, the older ones are 8 years old), we show that children regularly use aus Spiel while playing as a method for shaping the activity. Inventing new events, children try to get their co-players to accept them and act accordingly. In that context, issues of (dis-)alignment and deontic rights become relevant. Here, we are interested in the interactional work that aus Spiel-('let's pretend')-turns do and how co-players respond.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

Classification and Topics

• Subject: Fantasiespiel ; Kinderspiel ; Improvisation ; Kind ; Verhandlung ; Anpassung ; Reaktion ; Spielregel ; Sprache

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Schmidt, Axel ; Zinken, Jörg
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Göttingen : Verlag für Gesprächsforschung
• (when): 2021-04-28

Further information

• URN: urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-104236
• Last update: 06.03.2025, 9:00 AM CET