The chapter provides an overview of selected studies that, from the mid-twentieth century, have variously dealt with classroom language, interaction, and culture. Moving from the recognition that schools represent (at least in western societies) a major site for children’s socialization into the adult world, several ethnographic accounts of how this process concretely takes place in and through everyday classroom practices are presented and discussed. As the chapter illustrates, the focus on situated language use allows to appreciate how school is a lieu where the micro-macro dialectic emerges with particular evidence. Specifically, the chapter reports on research dealing with (a) classroom’ typical interactional structures, (b) teachers’ and pupils’ communicative practices, and (c) the interactional competence needed to appropriately participate in classroom everyday activities. An appraisal of the challenges that this multifaceted research field is facing in contemporary societies concludes the article.

The paper explores non-native children’s peer socialization to norms of literacy and appropriate language use in the classroom. Drawing on ethnographic research in a primary school in northern Italy, this study adopts a CA-informed approach to analyze an Italian L2 class attended by children aged 8 to 10. The study focuses on children’s enacting of correction sequences following peers’ problematic conduct. As the analysis illustrates, children creatively re-produce teachers’ ways of speaking to enforce normative uses of language. Through these practices, non-native children socialize their classmates into expected ways of speaking, reading, and writing, and negotiate the social hierarchy of the peer group. Risks and opportunities of such practices are considered in relation to children’s social inclusion and exclusion.

The paper explores children’s authoritative claims in the peer group, focusing on the practices through which children achieve a position of deontic and/or epistemic authority during peer conflict. Drawing from ethnographic research documented with video recordings in two primary schools in northern Italy, this study adopts a CA-informed approach to analyse 8- to 10-year-old children’s conflictual negotiations of authoritative positions in the group hierarchy. As the analysis illustrates, children mobilize institutional entities and strategically deploy knowledge to underpin their local claims of authority. In the discussion it is argued that such practices are relevant to children’s socialization into classroom expectations and to the local negotiation of valued identities in the peer group. These insights are also declined in relation to the dichotomy between social inclusion and exclusion.

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