About 45 % of the population of Luxembourg is of foreign origins. The Lusophone community, burgeoning from the early seventies on, forms the largest group The conspicuous multilingual and multicultural population, their diverse and altering demands generate complex challenges for public education (Portante & Max 2008). In preschool, children aged 4 to 6 learn Luxembourgish as the common language for integration and everyday interaction. This qualitative study focuses on 4 to 6 year old children of Portuguese, Cap Verdean and Brazilian origins negotiating the construction of a participation framework during story narration within the multilingual pre-primary classroom.

School socializes children into listening to stories told by the teachers following the practices in line with the historical tradition of the institution (e.g., Rogoff 1990). However, the analysis of data (transcribed video recordings) show how children within such a listening-to-reading situation (don’t) display orientation towards the acknowledged practices. Specifically, issues such as positioning and negotiation of positioning, ratification of topics, relevance of a particular mode of interaction, power relationships, changing expert-novice roles among peers etc. arise from the analysis of the participation framework (Goodwin 1981, 2000).

In the multilingual classroom, communicating, expressing ideas and organising interaction is organised around a cultural artefact called “story book”. A preliminary study (Wirtz 2010) focuses on pedagogical instances of this cultural tool. It emphasises the supported/not-supported construction of a participation framework within the preschool learning context. More specifically, it shows how children of different cultural backgrounds rely on various modes for interacting with each other and making sense of their environment. The importance of such a “space of joint action” becomes evident in considering the space of relations and embodied reciprocated tunings occurring in the concrete space of interaction and accomplished on different levels such as speech, posture, gestures, artefact- and sign-mediated actions, joint perceptions and so forth (Radford & Roth 2010).

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