Child‐focused research in conversation analysis (child‐CA) has been steadily coming into its own as it continues to amass a considerable body of work on the ways that children learn to talk as they become competent members of a culture. While there is an increasingly diverse set of contexts, themes, and disciplines that are drawn on in this work, it is nonetheless commonly driven by a microanalytic, naturally occurring, and in situ concern with showing how children participate, understand, and display interactional competencies in dealing with, finding a place in, and making sense of their social worlds.
The discussion in this entry of both consolidating and emerging themes in child‐CA research, limited to children aged from 12 months to seven years, is framed by two very broad, general areas that subsume a number of discrete themes. They are (a) competencies and understandings, and (b) childhood and interactions in pre‐ and early‐primary school settings.