Exploring peer interactions in a special education setting: Alignment and affiliation in reciprocal registering...

School is integral to the social lives of children. At school, children build relationships over time through successful interactions with their peers and teachers. A pervasive social action, registering (drawing mutual attention to a publicly perceptible referent), is a documented means of initiating interaction and building affiliation in childhood. This study uses conversation analysis to examine how children (aged 5-12) with a communication disability respond to registering in 5.6 hours of audiovisual recordings at an Australian English‑speaking special education primary school. 'Reciprocal registering' was identified as a recurring form of response. Reciprocal registering accomplished alignment and affiliation. In some interactions, however, moments of 'self-orientation' affected alignment and affiliation. This study contributes to our understanding of how children with a communication disability conduct social interactions with their peers in discrete social action sequences. The findings of this study demonstrate that professional understandings of communicative competence should reflect the dynamics and pressures of interaction and suggest a role for notions of agency in informing them.