“Toddlers as social actors in the Swedish preschool”.

The overall goal of this dissertation is to examine interaction, communication and friendships in young children’s self-initiated play. More specifically the goal of the article published, which is one of three articles on which the dissertation is based, is to examine how one-year-old children communicate with each other in self-initiated play.

The study illustrates different verbal and non-verbal ways of communicating 17-24-month-old children can make use of when playing with each other. These ways of communicating are both verbal and non-verbal with an overweight of non-verbal communication. The author finds that playing with children of the same age provides ample opportunity for 17-24-month-old children to develop their communicative skills, and concludes that the training of child carers should focus on 17-24-month-old children’s interaction skills and the importance of play. The study also shows how 17-24-month-old children make friendships. In making friendships, toddlers use non-verbal actions such as care, mutual attention, shared smiles, coordinated movements and other types of synchronised actions.

Two mornings a week, for five weeks, 17-24-month old children’s mutual play was recorded on video by the author with a hand-held camera. About eight hours of video was recorded in total, which was later loosely transcribed to provide an overview of what was going on. The sequences which were considered particularly interesting by the author and had much interaction and communication were transcribed in detail. The author identified 128 situations in total, and these were categorised in themes which illustrate the different ways children communicate with each other.

Engdahl, I. (2011). “Toddlers as social actors in the Swedish preschool”. Stockholm: Stockholms universitet. Engdahl, I. (2011). “Toddler interaction during play in the Swedish preschool”. Early Child Development and Care, 181(10), 1421-1439.

Engdahl, I. (2012). Doing friendship during the second year of life in a Swedish preschool. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 20(1), 83-98.