How to engage

This paper studies how children initiate telling-on sequences in kindergartens. The focus is on multimodal practices that children (6–7-year-olds) employ when engaging adults (teachers/caregivers) and peers in the telling-on sequences. The paper demonstrates how children utilise varying multimodal resources as well as display their moral stances in their telling-ons to recruit the adults’ intervention in the conflicts. The analyses also illustrate how the varying participation frameworks co-constructed by the participants have the potential to influence the organisation of the telling-ons and overall conflict resolution. The findings are based on video-recorded naturally occurring interactions in an English-speaking kindergarten in Finland. The data are analysed using the principles of multimodal conversation analysis.