Topic

This proposal is part of a broader doctoral dissertation examining children’s engagement in language-oriented play pedagogy in early childhood education. Situated within Nordic traditions of play pedagogy, it focuses on 6- to 7-year-old children and investigates how cultural features of play, defined as narratives, roles, objects, and cultural symbols, support children’s engagement. Engagement is the central phenomenon under study, conceptualized as active, embodied, and sustained participation, while language-oriented objectives, such as sound awareness and letter recognition, are embedded within play narratives as meaningful story components that children interact with.

The study will employ a novel, child-led, play-pedagogy-based method to examine how cultural features foster children’s engagement in language-oriented play pedagogy. Cultural features structure participation by providing tangible and symbolic resources that children use to communicate and co-construct play. Examining these features shows how engagement emerges within a socially and culturally organized context and how Nordic play traditions balance curricular language-oriented objectives with children’s agency. This analysis clarifies how culturally structured play fosters engagement and informs both theory and practice in play-based pedagogy.

Research Question

How do the cultural features of play pedagogy promote children’s engagement in language-oriented play pedagogy?

Objective

The objective of this study is to investigate how cultural features of play pedagogy provide social, cultural, and material resources that foster children’s engagement in language-oriented play pedagogy. Engagement is examined across three dimensions:

• Active participation: initiative-taking, problem-solving related to language-oriented objectives, and contributions to the play narrative.
• Embodiment in dialogue: expressed through speech, gesture, posture, gaze, and movement.
• Sustained participation: reflected in ongoing involvement, shared attention, and narrative continuity.

The study will investigate how cultural features actively mediate and scaffold engagement, and will employ a novel, child-led play-pedagogy method consisting of six narrative-based play sessions. It will explore how engagement is enacted and sustained when children interact with narrative components containing language-oriented objectives.

Conceptual and Theoretical Framework

The study is grounded in sociocultural theory (Bodrova & Leong, 2024; Rogoff, 2016; Vygotsky, 1978) and complemented by an enactive perspective on language, particularly Di Paolo’s concept of linguistic bodies (Di Paolo et al., 2018).

From a sociocultural perspective, engagement arises through participation in culturally meaningful activities, where children collaboratively explore language-oriented objectives within shared play narratives (Hakkarainen, 2008; Zuckerman, 2017). Additionally, the enactive perspective emphasizes that engagement is enacted through coordinated verbal and bodily actions, including gestures, posture, gaze, facial expressions, and vocal qualities (Di Paolo et al., 2018).

Together, these perspectives provide a holistic framework for understanding engagement as a socially, culturally, and embodied phenomenon emerging through interaction with others and with material environments.

Cultural Features in Play Pedagogy and Engagement

Drawing on Nordic traditions of play pedagogy, Lindqvist’s (1995) concept of playworlds emphasizes adults and children playing together to co-construct imaginary worlds. Hakkarainen (2008) expands this by incorporating problem-solving within play narratives. Narratives are collaboratively developed through characters that integrate problem-solving and language-oriented objectives embedded in the play narrative (Hakkarainen, 2008; Zuckerman, 2017).

Cultural features, defined as narratives, roles, objects, and symbols, structure participation and meaning-making in play. Meaningful narratives, such as familiar fairy tales, guide action and sustain engagement by creating dramatic tension and exploring fundamental conflicts, including fear–security and power–equality (Hakkarainen & Bredikyte, 2013).

Roles enable children to adopt and negotiate culturally meaningful positions. Objects and cultural symbols, such as a map with mysterious letters that invite interpretation, serve as mediational tools anchoring attention, supporting symbolic transformation, and fostering language use (Lindqvist, 1995; Zuckerman, 2017). These features scaffold dialogue, problem-solving, and participation in play. From an enactive perspective, they provide affordances linking action and interaction, shaping how children participate and sustain engagement (Di Paolo et al., 2018; Sparaci & Gallagher, 2023). 

This study adopts an action research design (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988), employing iterative cycles of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting to examine how cultural features of play foster children’s engagement in language-oriented play pedagogy. (1) During February–March 2026, a novel play-pedagogy-based method was developed as a research tool for examining children’s engagement. The method consists of six play sessions structured around a shared narrative that integrates language-oriented objectives, such as sound awareness and letter recognition. Cultural features meaningful to children are embedded in the narrative as analytic affordances, enabling examination of how these features invite, sustain, and shape engagement during play. (2) The method was piloted in one pre-primary group in April 2026 to test its usefulness and refine both the play design and analytic focus. In line with action research principles, the pilot sessions were implemented iteratively, with refinements based on observed engagement. This phase calibrates the method so that play sessions reliably highlight situations in which engagement can be systematically observed. (3) During Autumn 2026–Spring 2027, the refined method will be implemented as the primary tool for data collection and analysis in the main study. Play sessions will be conducted with three pre-primary groups, using video recordings, field notes, and children’s reflections to enable triangulation and strengthen the credibility of observations (Heale & Forbes, 2013). Data Analysis The analysis is based on repeated viewing of video-recorded play sessions, using a multimodal interactional approach (Heath, Hindmarsh & Luff, 2010; Goodwin, 2000). Video data are segmented into interactional episodes, defined as temporally bounded sequences of joint activity emerging from children’s orientations to play. Episode boundaries are identified through shifts in verbal interaction, participation frameworks, embodied orientation, and use of material or symbolic resources, and are analytically derived rather than pre-defined (Jordan & Henderson, 1995; Heath, Hindmarsh & Luff, 2010). Consistent with the study’s theoretical framework, engagement is analysed across three interrelated dimensions: children’s initiative-taking and problem-solving (active participation), bodily interaction (embodiment in dialogue), and continuity of attention and involvement over time (sustained participation). These dimensions provide a framework for identifying how engagement unfolds moment by moment and is sustained within play contexts. Episodes are analysed to examine how cultural features in play, such as narratives, roles, objects, and symbols,mediate participation. For example, a wooden stick may become a magic scepter, enabling shared attention, embodied dialogue, and collaborative problem-solving, making engagement visible within the play context.

Through these interconnected cultural features, engagement is expected to emerge as active, embodied, and sustained participation. Examining them in the broader dissertation will provide insights into how culturally structured play supports engagement in language-oriented play pedagogy and informs the design of child-centered, culturally responsive practices in early childhood education. Cultural features are anticipated to play a central role in scaffolding children’s engagement. Shared narratives, negotiated roles, and meaningful objects and cultural symbols are expected to create conditions that support initiative-taking, sustained attention, and coordinated verbal and bodily participation, allowing engagement to emerge as a holistic, embodied process characterized by collaborative problem-solving and co-construction of meaning. Objects and cultural symbols are likely to function as mediational resources, anchoring attention, supporting symbolic transformation, and sustaining engagement across episodes. Through these resources, children are expected to coordinate speech, gesture, movement, and affect, illustrating how engagement is deeply social, cultural, and embodied. The study is expected to contribute theoretically by extending sociocultural and enactive accounts of engagement, methodologically by demonstrating a structured, narrative-based play-pedagogy method for examining engagement, and pedagogically by informing culturally structured, language-oriented play-pedagogy-based approaches in early childhood education with relevance for Nordic and broader European contexts.

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