Language as context: A case of early literacy practices in New Zealand and Sweden

Globally, there has been increasing adaptation of curricula frameworks in early childhood education, providing overarching principles of practice rather than subject specific templates for teaching and learning. While such a movement is to be commended as supporting a socio-cultural approach in meeting each child's unique social and cultural needs, the implementation of frameworks is not straightforward (Bateman 2022 ). By applying an ethnomethodological approach to child-teacher interactions, this article explores how early childhood curricula frameworks in Sweden and New Zealand are implemented in everyday talk-in-interaction between children and teachers. We use an ethnomethodological (EM) approach (Garfinkel 2002 ) and conversation analysis (CA) (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974 ) approach (EMCA) to situate language as context. This approach offers a move away from the broader perspective of context being a static environmental space, to context as co-constructed by the participants through their immediate interactions (Goodwin and Duranti 1992 ). Contextual resources involve the concrete social situations, background cultural knowledge, language, activity and situation types, participants' knowledge about topics talked about and about each other and their interactional biographies (Linell 2009 , 17).