Afternoon snacktime languaging in the nursery

Meals constitute a significant and structuring activity in everyday life in early childhood institutions (Alcock 2007, Mortlock 2015). This paper focuses on a specific meal situation, namely the afternoon snacktime as it unfolds among toddlers and professionals in Danish nurseries targeted at 0-2 year old children. The paper draws on a linguistic ethnographic research project exploring language practices in Danish nurseries. The project is based on multi-sited fieldwork conducted by the three members of the research team in three different nurseries in two different cities in Western Denmark. During 10 months of fieldwork in each of the nurseries, a multi-facetted empirical material consisting of fieldnotes, photos, audio and video recordings has been produced and supplemented by interviews with professionals and exploratory interview-like conversations with the eldest toddlers. The analysis in this paper draws primarily on empirical material from one of the three nurseries and focuses especially on language practices connected to the afternoon snacktime. Taking White’s conceptualisation of the toddler as ”a competent yet vulnerable communicator of and with many voices” (White 2011:63) as a theoretical point of departure, a Bakhtin-inspired analytical lens is used to shed light on afternoon snacktime languaging in the nursery as a privileged social and communicative space.