Highlighting real-time mother-infant participation and attention supportive behaviours: Proposing implications for purposeful educator-infant interactions

Abstract

The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia V2.0 (EYLF; AGDE, 2022) guides education and care for children aged from birth to five years. This second version of the EYLF draws attention to children’s executive functions (EFs). However, the impact of the inclusion of EFs on pedagogy with children aged under three years has received little research attention. We reveal fine-grained interactional phenomena within a mother-infant dyad interaction and demonstrate how the mother’s conversational turns facilitate the three-month-old infant’s autonomous participation and sustained attention throughout a collaborative, co-constructed interaction. We highlight the sequential organisation of turns, carefully orchestrated by the mother, that creates opportunities for the infant to contribute to the back-and-forth interaction. We propose that early childhood educators could purposefully replicate some of the highlighted adult interactions in their talk-in-interaction with infants, as these create opportunities for infants to achieve sustained attention that may facilitate the emergence of EFs.