ABSTRACT
Young children, making sense of whom and where they are in the contexts of their everyday lives, experiment with how the languages they use impact on those engaged with them. An unusual and revealing piece of research was carried out by Fikriye Kurban and Joseph Tobin from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Arizona State University in Tempe, USA. What the researchers did next was carry out an analysis of all they had recorded using some of the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian literary theorist and philosopher of language; whose one wide-ranging idea has significantly influenced the thinking in cultural history, linguistics, literary theory and aesthetics. The language used is quite dense and academic but, with careful reading, should be comprehensible. As to performing Turkishness, the researchers suggest that the little girls put on a special performance for Fikriye, who, one remember is not German, but a Turkish professional woman, which is something rare in their world.
