Verbal practices for accomplishing homework: Socializing time and activity in parent-child interactions

This dissertation uses ethnographic methods and conversation analysis (CA) to analyze naturally-occurring parent-child directive response sequences about homework in dual-earner families. The analyses highlight homework as an interactional achievement between the parent and child and focuses on how discourse about homework socializes children to beliefs and practices concerning work and time management.; The study first presents an overview of the data corpus by providing ethnographic background on the participating families and situating homework as an activity in the families' lives. The overview uses interviews with parents and children and the systematic tracking of homework to discuss the involvement these parents display in their children's educations and how family members orient to homework in their daily lives. Core analyses of the three next chapters concern the interactional routines of parent-child talk about homework. One chapter examines how homework is topicalized by parents and children. Analysis of first mention sequences reveals that early homework inquiries by parents are a recurrent verbal practice allowing parents to topicalize homework and then segue into a planning sequence about homework. The analyses of first mentions document that directives are not isolated utterances, but can be situated within a larger set of sequences in order to initiate a particular activity. The analyses in the next chapter show how planning for activities in family life entails constructing the availability of time and temporally ordering activities. In particular, I focus on the practices of appending and prepending for prioritizing some activities over others. I argue that through these interactions children are socialized into time management and planning. Finally, the last analytic chapter examines accounts (ie. reasons and justifications) that parents use with their children in conjunction with directives for children to do homework. In these accounts, parents orient to homework as something to get out of the way and use a discourse of reward and punishment to mobilize children to do homework. The accounts parents provide are of interest for what they reveal about how parents perceive and socialize children to think about the task of homework.