Early language development in institutional settings is not self-evident. Even when there is a strong political will to actively promote equal opportunities by supporting the development of children's language capacities, studies show that professional training issues must not be neglected, at the risk of not securing the effects of the measures taken over time (Vogt, Stern & Filliettaz, 2022). Recent work has emphasized that professional training approaches play a key role in the quality of educational environments, and that these can only be supported by means of training measures of a collective nature, addressed to teams as a whole instead of selected individuals.
In this context, the work carried out for several years within the Interaction & Training team at the University of Geneva aims to develop continuing education programs in institutional contexts, based on the principles of interactional analysis (Filliettaz, Garcia & Zogmal, 2022). In these programs, professionals are invited to take part to video-based "data sessions", inspired by conversation analytic methods (Stevanovic & Weiste, 2017), under the guidance of researchers and trainers. They explore video recordings and transcripts in which they interact with children, with the aim to identify, share and discuss the sorts of interactional competences required and mobilized in current professional practice (Pekarek Doehler et al., 2017).
The objective of this paper is to present how this training methodology was implemented in an early language development program in order to foster analytic and training skills required for educators enrolled as reference staff within the program.
Based on transcribed excerpts of interactions taking place during training sessions, we will describe the ways in which educators engage with analytic procedures afforded by the training program and develop a reflective capacity regarding their interactions with children. Amongst the various analytic avenues possible for exploring this empirical material, three elements will be of particular interest in our presentation: a) the sorts of explicit or implicit conceptualizations of language as they circulate within participants taking part to the program, b) the ways in which educators make interpretations of children's actions as they can be observed in the recordings, and finally, c) the methods by which educators taking part to collective data sessions learn how to manage and carry out co-analysis sessions with their peers.
We will also show that the collaborative dimension of the analytical approach creates a common ground for understanding and interpreting multimodal phenomena visible in the film. The detailed analysis of verbal and non-verbal interactions thus creates opportunities to observe the participation of children who do not speak or speak little, without restricting the discussion to the presence or absence of verbal language. Thus, conceptions about language evolve during data analysis sessions, so as to take into account a variety of semiotic resources combined in interaction, beyond language. Such changes of perspectives can be regarded as outcomes of the specific analytic practices afforded by the training and make it possible to understand the sort of learning that arises from video-based interaction analysis as training method.
