Can I be with?:: Negotiating play entry in a bilingual school

This paper examines children's procedures for entering play activities in a bilingual school context. While most previous research has focused on individual 'access strategies' and their outcomes for peer group participation, the present study argues for a dialogic approach, particularly stressing the collaborative work involved in such interactions. In-depth analyses of entry episodes highlight a number of interactive resources, some of them closely related to the bilingual setting. These resources are discussed in terms of their local anchoring in the discourse structure, as well as in terms of participants' orientations to their functions. On this view, bilingualism is cast as a socially distributed phenomenon, managed in the local organization of play entry negotiations. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.