Introduction

Playing with and cleaning up toys are ubiquitous activities in early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions. In most cases, children rely on teachers to demarcate the beginnings and ends of play time, and teachers do so by issuing a directive to clean up. Directives – the class of verbal actions aimed at moving another to act (Searle, 1976) – are important resources for teachers, who are tasked with balancing the physical and emotional needs of children on one hand and the structural demands of the school schedule on the other. Conversely, as the addressees of directives, children come to recognize the various linguistic and embodied ways directives are accomplished and the social factors that shape them. These include factors like entitlement (Curl & Drew, 2008), deontic authority (Frick & Palola, 2022), and contingency (Craven & Potter, 2010; Wootton, 1997). In other words, directives play an important role in their language socialization process, or the process by which they become competent and valued speakers and social actors through linguistically mediated interaction with others.

Because ECEC institutions are one of the first places where Japanese children have extended interactions with adults outside of their family, understanding how directives socialize young children in ECEC contexts is critical for documenting their life-long participation in Japanese institutions and society. For preschools, cleanup time is one such activity in which adults provide directives that are consequential for the progression of other everyday activities. Japan’s national guidelines for preschool education also specify that cleanup time is important for young children’s development of a pro-social disposition, among other benefits (e.g., MEXT, 2017; MHLW, 2017). Cleanup time therefore offers a perspicuous setting for the study of directives and their socializing potential. Accordingly, this paper addresses the following questions:

1. What resources (linguistic, embodied) and practices does the teacher use in directive sequences during the routine cleanup activities in a Japanese nursery school?

2. How do those practices play a role in the socialization of Japanese children to normative beliefs about tidiness and responsibility?

In the next sections, I briefly review the literature on cleaning up and how directives in the context of cleanups play a role in Japanese children’s socialization process before introducing the current study.

Directives as a Resource For (Children’s) Language Socialization

Directives have now occupied a focus in sociolinguistics for over half a century beginning with their classification within Speech Act Theory (e.g., exercitives in Austin, 1962; directives in Searle, 1976) and later Politeness Theory (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989; Ervin-Tripp et al., 1990). Early work by Ervin-Tripp (1976), among many others, showed that the distribution of directive formats correlates with different social variables, such as the relationship between interlocutors, participation frameworks, and their interactional histories. The Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1984; Blum-Kulka et al., 1989) similarly found that strategies for doing requests (a type of directive) varied according to social variables like power, social distance, and the level of imposition the directive caused, as well as variation between linguacultures. Since then, major developments in areas like Conversation Analysis (CA) and Interactional Linguistics (IL) have given new insight into how interactional constraints affect the design and deployment of directives, such as the type of action directed, the beneficiar(ies) of the directed action, its temporal implementation, and the deontic rights of the interlocutors (Couper-Kuhlen, 2014; Craven & Potter, 2010; Curl & Drew, 2008; Drew & Couper-Kuhlen, 2014; Frick & Palola, 2022; Kendrick & Drew, 2016; Rossi, 2012, 2018). Amongst adults, Rossi’s (2012) study on two common linguistic formats for requesting in Italian revealed distributional differences based on whether the request was bilateral (i.e., part of a project jointly attended to by both the requesting party and the requested party) or unilateral (i.e., part of launching a new project by the requesting party). Wootton (1997) showed that children as young as three can come to recognize the social constraints of requesting, including the projected grantability of the request. Most recently, greater attention has been placed on how directives work in combination with embodied and non-verbal resources (e.g., Cekaite & Burdelski, 2021; Cekaite & Goodwin, 2021; Goodwin & Cekaite, 2014; Siitonen et al., 2021).

Directives, which for children “constitute the basic resource through which transactions take place,” (Goodwin & Cekaite, 2014, p. 186) are a prime locus for studying children’s language socialization process because children must learn the social and interactional factors governing their use and interpretation. This observation underpins the central claims of language socialization theory, which posits that children become competent members in society through interaction with more expert others. These interactions contribute to children’s acquisition of both language and social rules that enable their legitimate participation in (and transformation of) society (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). This process entails both socialization through language and socialization to use language. Socialization through language refers to the ways language and interaction shape children’s understanding of their social world, such as the role of young children in the community, or their social status vis-à-vis other interlocutors (e.g., Ochs, 1982; Schieffelin, 2005). Socialization to use language refers to how children are socialized to produce language in ways that are consistent with community-defined norms and values, such as saying ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ upon receiving a gift (e.g., Burdelski, 2010, 2015).

Previous language socialization research on directive sequences involving children has shown that they socialize children into social identities, relationships, roles, and skills (Cekaite, 2010; de León, 2017; Ervin-Tripp et al., 1984; Field, 2001; M. Goodwin & Cekaite, 2013, 2014, 2018; Moore, 2013; Ochs, 1982; Schieffelin, 2005). In Japanese families, Clancy’s (1986) study of five mother-child dyads documented the range of methods Japanese mothers used in giving directives to their two-year-old children, showing that Japanese mothers most frequently used bare imperative forms (i.e., V-te and V-nasai) and statements of obligation (i.e., You must / mustn’t do X). Her study provided evidence of how Japanese children are socialized to attend to others’ feelings and desires, or omoiyari (empathy). Based on the distribution of directive ‘strategies’ and a qualitative analysis of their form and contents, Clancy argued that omoiyari and conformity were observable as socialization goals of mothers because indirect forms of directives often made reference to the needs and wants of others, delivered in the form of “hints” (cf. Ervin-Tripp, 1997). Takada’s (2013) study of child-addressed directives with a larger data set found that requests were more frequent than commands¹ and similarly concluded that their deployment in interaction is a resource for the socialization of omoiyari. Takada and Endo’s (2015) study of object-transfer sequences found that directives to initiate object transfer help to socialize children into pro-moral behaviors like sharing and caring for younger siblings. More recently, Endo’s (2023) study of instruction-giving during a Shinto offering ritual showed how different category memberships (e.g., Shinto priest, caregiver) are dynamically negotiated through directive sequences.

In sum, while directives have enjoyed a consistent seat in the research spotlight, they have increasingly been attended to by micro interactional approaches such as CA and IL that more clearly show how directives are constructed, responded to, and used as a socializing resource. However, most of the research on directives privileges the home (especially mother-child dyads) as the context of study. By comparison, Japanese ECEC institutions like preschools and nursery schools remain relatively understudied (cf. Burdelski, 2019).² Addressing this gap, this paper focuses on the routine cleanup activities in a Japanese nursery school to better understand children’s participation in and socialization to the moral and aesthetic dimensions of cleaning up.

Cleaning Up in Japan(ese)

Tidiness is highly valued in Japanese culture, extending from the highest cultural forms down to the mundane scenes of everyday life. In aesthetic accounts of cultural practices such as tea ceremony, flower arranging, garden making, and Noh theatre, tidiness is in part what creates the aesthetic of wabi, or understated beauty through simplicity (Hirota, 1995). Tidiness (cleanliness, neatness, etc.) refers to the aesthetic dimension of the surface qualities of space, time, and structure (e.g., Leddy, 1995). In anthropological accounts of Japanese culture, a state of tidiness is said to be desirable because it represents the cultural aesthetic ideals of balance and harmony (和 wa) that are reflected in the simple yet intentional organization of many cultural spaces and activities, such as Japanese tea houses (Hirota, 1995), stone gardens (Keene, 1969; Miller, 2011), and flower arrangements (Suzuki, 2001).³ Tidiness and cleanliness are aesthetics also associated with learning to live a proper life within the group, codified in the guidelines of major institutions governing ECEC facilities (e.g., MEXT, 2017; MHLW, 2017).⁴ For example, the curriculum guidelines for preschool education published by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare’s (MHLW) Children and Families Agency notes that cleaning up is a “basic routine of life” which is important and necessary for children “to independently achieve life in preschool” (MHLW, 2017, pp. 68-69). Similar writing can be found in explanations of the technical guidelines published by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) for the national standard of preschool curriculum (MEXT, 2017). Hence, there is a strong orientation to the pro-moral and pro-social value tidiness has, both within Japanese educational institutions and beyond them.

In the everyday lives of children, Japanese parents and caregivers also devote much of their time getting their children to clean up and socializing them into an aesthetic that values tidiness. In Japanese preschools, children as young as three are prompted to take off their shoes and outerwear at the entryway and to neatly arrange them in their designated location, a feat which children become able to do autonomously over time (Peak, 1993; Tobin et al., 1991). Leaving shoes haphazardly scattered in the entryway is considered unacceptable and often invites correction, even within the home by Japanese mothers (Lebra, 1976). At the dinner table, eating sloppily or indecorously is cause for shame and humiliation by peers (Takada, 2019, pp. 9-11). Cleaning up is especially important for young children when considering the longer life-trajectories where tidiness is expected. As they begin elementary school, Japanese children become responsible for cleaning their classrooms and other public spaces, such as the school courtyard or toilets (Furushige, 2019; Nakanishi & King, 1997). Although cleaning in primary and secondary schools has been a practice from even before World War 2, school cleaning has been codified in the MEXT’s curriculum for elementary and middle school students from 2008 (Tsuneyoshi et al., 2016). Its stated goals are to instill positive attitudes not only towards improving their surrounding environment, but also to foster bonds with members of their group (e.g., classmates, teachers) through teamwork and responsibility (MEXT, 2008). After graduating college, many companies train new employees to uphold seiri seiton (keeping things in their proper place) in their process of becoming not only skillful workers, but also “good citizens who can contribute to society” (Kinoshita & Kikuchi, 2020, p. 118).

Directives are therefore an excellent locus to examine the part played by cleaning up in Japanese children’s language socialization, not least because children are not inherently imbued with tidiness as a moral or aesthetic value and rather must be facilitated towards acquiring tidy habits. In their study of American and Swedish homes, Goodwin and Cekaite (2014, 2018) documented how haptic control and bodily formations play a role in reorienting children who are reluctant to clean up their rooms or take showers, with proximity playing a large role in redirecting locomotion at the onset of directives to clean or shower. Fasulo and colleagues’ (2007) study of cleaning socialization in American and Roman homes found differences in the degree to which children are constructed as agents in cleaning activities. In some cleaning activities, such as tidying the bed, young Roman children may not be considered valid agents and it is instead a burden parents must deal with on behalf of their children (Fasulo et al., 2007, pp. 17-18). Finally, in the Japanese home, Korenaga and colleagues (2021) studied how a Japanese family negotiated the responsibility for cleaning up and how a cleanup activity was transformed into a collaborative effort between a father and two sons. While studying a limited number of cases, they note that “future studies on diverse settings will allow for investigations into possible ways of making [the general rules of tidying up activities] general[izable]” (p. 175). The present study presses their concern by extending the study of cleanup activities into a major ECEC institution – the nursery school.

Data

The data for this study come from a larger corpus of 25 hours of video recordings taken of interactions in one class of four-year-olds of the Vineyard Nursery School (pseudonym, hereafter VNS), a nursery school (hoikuen) based in the Kansai region of Japan. A total of seven instances of cleanup (roughly one hour) occurring in the transition between scheduled morning activity blocks comprises the data analyzed here. The teacher in the VNS classroom that the researcher observed is a veteran of five years and has undergone extensive training in specialized programs for the care of young children. On average, eight children were present in the class during observation periods. All names are pseudonyms.

In their mission statement, VNS states that their goal is to “raise children to be able to live strongly, to problem-solve, and to flexibly adapt to change” (VNS document, my translation). They also state the six values they aim to instill in children: respect, nurturing, trust, flexibility, balance, and sustainability. Hence, cleanup time is one occasion where these socialization goals may be interactionally on display.

Method

The study utilized multimodal CA to examine the verbal and non-verbal (i.e., embodied) practices used by the teacher in the morning cleanup activity. First, talk was transcribed according to Jeffersonian (2004) conventions, with additional lines for translation into idiomatic English and interlinear gloss where relevant. Multimodal (i.e., embodied, non-verbal) action was transcribed using a simplified version of Mondadian transcription (Mondada, 2018) with adaptations from Burch (2014) for the organization of transcription lines (see Appendices A and B). Then, qualitative analysis consisting of line-by-line analysis by the researcher was improved through repeated data sessions regarding focal excerpts with colleagues. Finally, the data were coded to provide descriptive statistics for two aspects of the directive sequences: (i) the distribution of resources for doing directives and (ii) the relative frequency with which they occur.

The present study adapts Floyd and colleagues’ (Floyd et al., 2020) model for analyzing the wider body of actions that provision action from another person (i.e., recruitment) to more narrowly examine directives (i.e., excluding ‘offers’). In this paper, the term directive refers to a class of actions which are part of a directive-response sequence (M. Goodwin, 1980) consisting of a minimum of two interactional ‘moves’ (Goffman, 1981) between two participants, pA and pB:

Move A: pA says or does something to pB, or that pB can see or hear;

Move B: pB does some practical action for or with pA that is fitting to what pA has said or done, including:

• Fulfillment: a practical action performed for or with pA;

• Rejection: the conveyance of inability or unwillingness to fulfill the directive;

• Deferral of fulfillment;

• Initiation of repair (which is often related to fulfillment)

If pB ignores Move A, then the pA must pursue compliance for Move A to be counted as a directive.

Additionally, pA may expand the sequence through a third move, Move C:

Move C: pA says or does something that is fitting to Move B

Directives as studied here thus include both initial, first position directives and directive pursuits when Move B is not fulfillment. Analyzing directives in their sequential environment as opposed to individual and disconnected utterances is necessary for understanding how and why they are formatted for use in interaction (M. Goodwin, 2006). Hence, even social actions that can and have been studied as stand-alone actions (e.g., thanking, assessing) come to embody different social meanings through their use in directive-response sequences. Accordingly, detailed sequential analysis is necessary for identifying all such actions that can be understood as directives (i.e., are treated by participants as such).

Analysis

The total number of initial directives (i.e., Move As) and expansions (Move Cs) by Teacher are reported in Table 1. Surprisingly, the total number of directives, such as Announcements, Proposals*, Requests*, and Suggestions*, are almost equal to (and are slightly exceeded by) the number of post-expansion moves, such as thanking, assessing, and stance displays.

Assuming a perfect one-to-one match of a Move A to a Move C, this would mean that for each directive issued by the teacher, a follow-up move (e.g., ‘Thank you’) was issued, and at least one case where a Move A received multiple expansions. It is worth noting that such a high frequency of expansion type moves has not been reported in previous cross-linguistic studies of expressions of gratitude, which were one of the main response types in the Move C category (Floyd et al., 2018). In Floyd and colleagues’ (2018) study, the gratitude expressions following fulfillment of requests in mundane interactions across eight languages ranged from 0% (Cha’palaa) to 14.5% (English). Thus, such a high number of Move Cs is especially salient in the data set.

The next sections will discuss Move As and Move Cs and highlight the most frequent resources and the practices they construct in their sequential context.

Move As – Initial Directives

Table 2 shows the distribution of formats for first directives (Move As).⁶ Formal definitions of each category can be found in Appendix C.

Declaratives

In contrast to findings from Clancy’s (1986) and Takada’s (2013) studies, declaratively formatted utterances made up a much larger percentage of directives than imperatives in the present data set (n = 15). Declaratives encompassed two major kinds of social actions in the directive sequences during clean up: announcements and noticings (Pillet-Shore, 2021). The opening of the cleanup activity was especially routine in structure and use of declaratively formatted directives. In transitioning from play time to cleaning time, Teacher utilized two routine directive practices: providing a declaratively formatted announcement that cleanup time will begin and playing the Cleanup Song on the piano. Excerpt 1, which took place near the end of the play period, represents the common organization of these openings. It begins with Teacher (TEA) giving the first warning to children that cleanup was to soon begin.

Excerpt 1. Announcing the start of cleanup time [7.29 Cam1vid3 7:27]

Near the end of play time, Teacher makes a class-wide announcement that cleanup will begin when the long hand of the clock reaches ‘8’ (i.e., XX:40), gazing at the clock and holding up 8 fingers (line 1, fig 1b). This activity contract (Aronsson & Cekaite, 2011) was only visibly attended to by one child, Kazu (KAZ), who gazes at Teacher and shifts his gaze to the clock during its production. Several minutes elapse while children continue playing and Teacher periodically monitors the clock (line 2, not shown). After a few minutes, Teacher stands, walks to the piano, opens its lid, and turns it on in preparation to play the Cleanup Song (lines 3-5). After readying the piano, Teacher issues an announcement (lines 7-8). Its formulation contains two Turn-constructional Units (TCUs)⁷, each of which deserve attention.

First comes a time reference (Well then, the long hand has become ‘8’). As shown in (1), the TCU is format-tied (M. Goodwin, 1990) and calls back to the initially issued contract.

(1)

1 TEA: When (the long hand) becomes eight, it’s (time to) clean up, alright? At eight.

HACHI NI NATTARA OKATADUKE NE::, HACHI NI::

eight DAT become-POT tidy.up IP eight DAT

…

6 TEA: Well then, (the long hand) has become eight,

SA::::TE HACHI NI NARIMASH::TA:::,

well.then eight DAT become-HON-PST

7 (We) will tidy up.

OKATADUKE SHIMA::SU

tidy.up do-HON

This formulation holds children accountable to the contract they previously established by recycling (or cannibalizing, to use Schegloff’s term) the condition that marks cleaning up: the position of the clock hand. The on-stage and public nature of the announcement is also evident from its style in the honorific form (cf. Cook, 1996). The initial word of the first TCU sate ‘well then’ (line 6) is also typically reserved for formal registers of speech or writing and marks a transition in discourse topic (Koda, 1995) and its function here appears to overlap with functions of well-prefaced TCUs in English (Heritage, 2018). Although highly salient in terms of register, Teacher’s exaggerated prosody frames it as non-serious. The final mora of the predicate (tense marker ta) is preceded by a lengthening of the inflexed core verb (narimas ‘become-HON’) and produced in time with a C-major chord played on the piano. In this case, the timing of the piano and its concurrence with the verbal production of the account strongly projects the next stage of the opening of cleanup time: the playing of the Cleanup Song.

The second TCU contains the announcement proper (line 8, [We] will tidy up). Its declarative formatting, also in the honorific form, is similar in format to openings in other forms of institutional talk such as business meetings (Boden, 1994; Nielsen, 2013). Teacher, like the chair of a business meeting, possesses the deontic authority to control the flow of the institutional schedule. Unlike parent-child cleanups, however, Teacher’s deontic authority is never overtly contested by children (cf. Korenaga et al., 2021). A further dimension is the fact that the subject is not present in the announcement’s formulation. Being a pro-drop language, Japanese grammatical subjects are optionally elided in surface syntax. The agent of cleaning up is thus left to children to be tacitly interpreted as ‘we,’ by virtue of Teacher’s subsequent actions (i.e., proceeding to help children clean up), their knowledge of the routines of the nursery school classroom, and their joint interactional histories with Teacher.

The announcement to begin cleanup is followed in all but one instance by the playing of the Cleanup Song on the piano by Teacher. This musical routine is shown in Excerpt 2, which begins immediately following Excerpt 1.

Excerpt 2. Playing the Cleanup Song [7.29 Cam1vid4 2:54]

Throughout the data, this coupling of ‘announcement + Cleanup Song’ is instantly recognizable by children through their various forms of uptake. In Excerpt 2, Akashi (AKA) displays his understanding of this recurrent practice to be a directive by beginning to clean up even prior to the onset of the music (i.e., through gazing at a target item to be cleaned up). As the song begins, Akashi moves to grab balls on the floor (lines 9-10, figures 5-6).

After this opening routine, Teacher typically walked around the room and helped children tidy up. Teacher assisted in picking up blocks, tidying craft bins, and moving furniture to the edges of the room. In general, however, Teacher tended to work on parts of cleanup that pose danger or difficulty to children, such as folding away tables to be put away or accessing the crafts material stored overhead. Conversely, children were held primarily responsible for cleaning the toys they took out, and, when their own cleaning was finished, for the cleaning of other items in the room, regardless of their role in taking it out. In this way, responsibility for toys was socialized as residing within the group, rather than the individual.

Declaratively formatted directives were one of the ways Teacher emphasized the group’s responsibility for cleaning. Beside announcements, declaratively formatted directives appeared in instances where children were aimlessly walking around without cleaning despite items being left out, resembling what Rossi (2018) calls factual declaratives. These declaratives describe a state of affairs which is implicitly problematic or troublesome in the context of the ongoing activity (cleaning up) and to the teacher’s project (getting children to participate in the cleanup). Unlike Rossi’s collection, however, these declaratives were frequently featured in multi-party, highly publicized noticings in which recipiency was designedly opaque, such as in Excerpt 3. In Excerpt 3, Teacher notices that a pair of scissors has been left out on the drawing table, despite nearby children who had been at the drawing table aimlessly walking about rather than cleaning up.

Excerpt 3. Noticing the scissors are out [8.5 Cam1vid3 6:09]

After having placed an item on the children’s personal cubbies lining the classroom wall, Teacher turns and notices a pair of scissors left on the desk (line 1). This is especially salient because scissors can pose a serious threat to unwary young children. Teacher then produces a highly upgraded noticing, prefacing it with an alert (Oh my!) and framing the scissors as yet another item left out (line 2, also). Teacher nevertheless does not direct any individual child to put away the scissors, and immediately pivots to walk away from it and toward another area to be cleaned, praising a separate child on her way (line 3). Eiko (EIK), who had been at the drawing table earlier but was then ambling around the perimeter of the table, attends to Teacher’s noticing through her gaze (line 2), then goes on to procure the scissors (line 5) and return them to their rightful owner (lines 5-6).

Teacher’s choice in using a noticing in this context is noteworthy. Given the danger of loose scissors and her proximity to it at the moment, Teacher could have just as easily identified the owner of the scissors herself and returned it to the cubby of the owner, or hail the individual child whose name appears on its label to put away what she has taken out, as is commonly the case in American preschools (e.g., Tobin et al., 1991, pp. 132-133). However, by choosing to notice in an accountable way which may furnish the interactive grounds for later sanctions, Teacher actively encourages children – any child in earshot and unoccupied, including the potentially forthcoming owner – to participate in tidying up the space. Rather than insisting on any individual child’s compliance, the Teacher’s reliance on noticings can be seen as a socialization strategy that builds children’s sense of responsibility for their items and the management of its cleanliness.

It should be noted that these noticings are not defined by the cognitive states of participants (cf. Schmidt, 1995). Even in instances like Excerpt 4, where Kazu is actively playing with a bottle cap, Teacher uses declaratively formatted noticing as a means of requesting the cap be put away in its respective bin. Although Kazu had been playing with the bottle cap, Teacher addresses Kazu through gaze and ‘notices’ that the cap is still on the ground (line 1). Kazu initially bends down to pick up the cap, but ultimately knocks it away again, potentially in an effort to prolong his play time with it.

Excerpt 4. Noticing a stray bottle cap [7.29 Cam1vid4 4:21]

Hence, while these noticings can be directed at a singular recipient, they remain thoroughly designed as public through volume and pitch, which is part of why they are hearable to the children as requests to clean up these objects. These “hints” are indeed not transparently directives and thus can be more easily ignored, such as by Kazu in the case of Excerpt 4 (line 2) (cf. Ervin-Tripp, 1976, pp. 42-45).

Imperatives

After declaratives, imperatives make up the second most frequent initial directive format (n = 12). Most imperatively formatted directives took a single child as an addressee (n = 8) and named a single action not part of the usual routine of cleaning up. Excerpt 5 is one example where Teacher responded to Yui’s (YUI) attempt to place her ribbon craft on top of the class-shared crafts cubby rather than her own.

Excerpt 5. Put it in your pencil box [8.5 Cam1vid3 5:31.4]

As Teacher is monitoring the cleanup progress through her lighthouse gaze (line 1), Yui solicits Teacher’s attention and informs her she will ‘wrap up’ her ongoing ribbon project (line 2). This is met with Teacher’s minimal acknowledgment (line 3) and, after a short gap, praise (line 5). Yui then problematizes where to store her craft, asking through declarative format to rest it on top of the crafts cubby (line 6). The inclusion of the auxiliary verb -oku indicates Yui intends to return to the craft later (Kondo, 2014). Teacher, however, does not ratify this and instead directs Yui to place her craft in her pencil box located in her personal cubby (line 7). After walking off camera, Yui haphazardly places it in her own cubby and Teacher issues a repair initiation, reidentifying the exact location where Yui should place her craft through a modified repeat (Put it in your pencil box, line 9).

The finding that imperatives appear in these types of directives, which are directed at individual children and involve a local project distinct from the larger activity, mirrors findings in adult-adult interaction regarding the “cline of visible commitment” (Rossi, 2012; Zinken & Deppermann, 2017). In other words, the imperative form indexes Teacher’s sensitivity to Yui’s commitment to a distinct line of action (placing the craft on the crafts cubby) and the very different line projected by her directive (placing it in the pencil box). Imperatives in the data set commonly happen in these interactional organizations, including repair-implicative corrections to children’s cleaning behavior and pursuits of compliance.

Prototypical Request Format

Although the third most frequent initial directive format was tied between several categories, including other-directed utterances formatted as prototypical requests and benefactive constructions, and self-directed utterances formatted in interrogative and volitional forms, only prototypical request forms and self-directed interrogatives are discussed here owing to their prominence (request forms) or absence (self-directed interrogatives) in prior research. Prototypical request forms appear to be deployed as class-wide broadcasts in instances where child participation in cleaning up is limited. As an ‘on record’ strategy (Brown & Levinson, 1987), their use more strongly projects a response aligning with the request or an account for non-fulfillment.

As a category, prototypical request formats were utterances that take a request-verb, such as ‘(I) request’, as its predicate. Onegaishimasu was the most common request verb in the data, which is composed of the verb negau ‘to request’ conjugated in the humble honorific form (o + V + shimasu). Excerpt 6 is an example of the most common use of request formats, which is a class-wide broadcast requesting children to clean up the chairs. In Excerpt 6, most of the larger toys (i.e., wood blocks, art supplies) have been tided away, leaving only the chairs to be stacked and a few Lego blocks to be returned to their proper bins. Children, however, who normally manage these tasks, are preoccupied with a spontaneous jumping contest.

Excerpt 6. Please, the chairs too [8.20 Cam1vid1 27:56]

As Teacher moves chairs into the corner of the room in preparation for lunch (line 1), Teacher requests that children assist in taking care of the chairs ‘and other things’ (toka, etcetera) using the prototypical request verb onegaishimasu (request-HON) (line 3). However, in this case, no child except Akashi displays uptake to Teacher’s request. As the case in point, Yui overlappingly asks other children about whether they could jump on one foot (line 5) without orienting to Teacher’s request, and only Akashi continues tidying up Lego blocks. The broadcast is also prefaced with the sate ‘Well then’ seen in Excerpt 1. Hence, the prototypical request form may be a way to ‘relaunch’ premature closure of the cleaning activity.

Self-Directed Interrogative

Self-directed interrogatives, while not especially frequent, were extremely potent as a means of securing children’s compliance with cleaning up. Self-directed interrogatives typically feature Teacher ‘voicing’ her inner thoughts as she monitors children’s cleanup progress, positioning children as unaddressed ratified overhearers (Goffman, 1981). Excerpts 7 and 8 are two abbreviated examples from a larger sequence (shown in expanded form as Excerpt 12). In Excerpt 7, Teacher broadcasts the question ‘I wonder who is the cleanup master’ with no visible addressee. Excerpt 8, issued later within the same cleanup, similarly questions ‘who is coolly cleaning up.’

Excerpt 7. Who is a master cleaner? [7.22 Playtime-8 2:54]

Excerpt 8. Who is coolly cleaning up? [7.22 Playtime-8 3:19]

As will be shown later, these ‘wonder alouds’ are frequently paired with expansions such as positive assessments of cleaning children, and these pairings ultimately motivate children to begin cleaning up.

Initial Directive Uptake and Pursuing Compliance

Overall, the children in the data regularly complied with directives from Teacher, and while some instances involved child reluctance (e.g., complaining, ignoring), blatant rejection was never witnessed. In some cases, such as Excerpts 2 (Clean Up Song) and 6 (Please, the chairs too), children may nevertheless fail to comply promptly. Chart 1 shows the number of children who display overt cleaning behaviors (i.e., putting away toys, packing away writing utensils, closing and organizing books, dismantling Lego constructions, locomotion and gaze towards incipiently cleaned items, etc.) after the opening of cleaning time. In all but one instance, around two to four children do not show any uptake to the initial directive to begin cleanup at the opening of cleanup time.

Chart 1. Initial cleanup announcement uptake

*Teacher did not play the Cleanup Song on 8.6

**All children displayed cleaning behavior by the end of the Cleanup Song on 8.19

However, as documented in previous ethnographies of Japanese preschools, children’s lack of immediate uptake to a teacher’s directives is not heavily sanctioned by teachers, at least amongst four-year-olds in preschool (e.g., Tobin et al., 1991; 2009). Additionally, by the end of cleanup time, each child in the classroom participated in cleaning up, even if in some minimal manner.

A lack of sanctions for non-compliant children, however, does not mean that Teacher did not pursue compliance. When faced with a lack of uptake to directives to begin cleaning from children, Teacher typically moved from more indirect to more direct formatting of her directives, such as in Excerpt 9.

Excerpt 9 (cont. from Ex. 4). Embodiment as upgrading [7.29 Cam1vid4 4:21]

Excerpt 9 continues from Excerpt 4, where Kazu is playing with a bottle cap requested by Teacher to be put away through a declaratively formatted noticing (line 1). Kazu continues playing with the cap and does not show recipiency to Teacher’s initial request (line 2). However, Teacher then upgrades her directive to an ‘on record’ strategy (Brown & Levinson, 1987) through the use of a prototypical request verb choodai ‘please (give)’ and naming Kazu as the addressee (line 3). Despite gazing at Teacher, who produces a pointing gesture at the bin (line 5), Kazu continues to play with the cap by sliding it across the floor (line 6). After 3.6 seconds with no response from Kazu, Teacher reissues the request, this time forwarding Kazu’s name as the addressed recipient (line 7) and simultaneously pushes the cap bin towards Kazu. After finally establishing and sustaining mutual gaze with Kazu, Kazu offers the cap to Teacher with an outstretched arm, bottle cap resting on his flat open palm (line 8, fig 16). Teacher, however, rejects the proffering, instead pointing at him (line 9, fig 17a) and then at the cap bin once more (line 10, fig 17b). Only then does Kazu begin to crawl towards the bin, picking up a stray bottlecap on his way (line 11, fig 18). The sequence comes to a close as Teacher thanks him for his additional work (line 12).

This case highlights how embodiment is used to upgrade the severity of the directive, as well as to show the boundaries of responsibility in cleaning up. Despite Kazu’s delay, he eventually proffers Teacher the cap. Teacher, however, uses embodied gestures such as pointing and scooting the cap bin toward Kazu to demonstrate that simply proffering it is insufficient; Kazu must see through putting away the cap because playing with a toy means being responsible for its return to its proper place.

In one case, music was also used to pursue stronger uptake with the cleaning activity. As shown in Excerpts 1 and 2, Teacher routinely opens clean up time through the use of an announcement and playing the Cleanup Song on the piano. However, the song is typically played only once through. In Excerpt 10, continued from Excerpt 2, the Cleanup Song is repeated with permutations which were then ascribed by children as a functional upgrade of the announcement that cleanup time was to begin.

Excerpt 10 (cont. from Ex. 2). Musical permutation as pragmatic upgrade [7.29 Cam1vid4 3:00]

Through the musical modulation (i.e., transposing the phrase one octave up and increasing the tempo from roughly 300 to 400 beats per minute), Teacher effectively upgrades the strength of the directive to begin cleaning up through music. This ascription is reflected in children’s sudden and rapid change in activity: Kazu, who had been playing with Legos, begins to move towards the block area (line 1). Yui, who had been playing in another corner of the room, sprints towards the block area (lines 1-3) to toss a bottle cap back into the cap bin (line 4). Akashi, who had been playing alongside Riku (RIK) with the blocks and who had begun to clean up, reprimands his playmate who continues to play with blocks despite the quickened music’s incipient final bars (line 3). After Teacher finishes the final chord and turns off the piano (lines 4-5), she quickly offers praise for children who had begun cleaning up (lines 6, 8).

Move Cs – Expansion Moves

One of the primary findings of the quantitative analysis was that expansion moves were more frequent than initial directives. This is surprising because expansion moves are not mandatory for directive-response sequences to be ‘complete.’ In other words, they are not structurally required.

The observed expansion practices of the teacher were primarily one of three well-documented social actions: assessment (Pomerantz, 1981); stance displays (Ochs, 1990); and thanking (Zinken et al., 2020). Assessment and stance displays share much overlap in the CA literature – here, assessment is taken to mean any utterance that displays an evaluative stance towards an object, person, or behavior (Küttner, 2023), whereas stance displays are limited to utterances that reveal a speaker’s affective or epistemic stance. Table 4 shows the distribution of these expansion practices.

Assessments took the form of positive evaluations of children’s behavior, or in other words, praise. Excerpt 11, which appeared in Excerpt 3, is one such example where Wahito’s (WAH) lifting of the chair is contingently praised by Teacher as she moves to clean up the next area.

Excerpt 11 (from Ex. 3). Noticing the scissors are out [8.5 Cam1vid3 6:14]

Importantly, the focally assessed object in the cleanup activity is children’s compliance with Teacher’s directives. In cases where children display cleaning behavior, Teacher does a very public positive assessment. Conversely, negative assessments for non-compliance, including delayed compliance, were never witnessed during cleaning time. As noted previously, assessments were often prefaced by Teacher’s self-directed interrogatives or ‘wonder aloud’ utterances. Excerpt 12, which is the continuation of Excerpts 7 and 8, shows how an assessment prompts nearby children to quicken their pace of cleaning up the wooden blocks.

Excerpt 12 (cont. from Ex. 7). Who is coolly cleaning up [7.22 Playtime-8 3:20]

In Excerpt 12, Teacher patrols the classroom and scans the room for cleaning children. Upon spotting Eiko mid-turn, Teacher cuts off her syntactically complete sentence and issues a change-of-state token OH (Heritage, 1984) (line 1). She continues to produce a name (Eiko-chan Eiko-SFX) and assesses her behavior as ‘cool’ (kakkoii).⁸ In turn, nearby children Jamie (JAM), Yui, Akashi, and Wahito, who were slowly cleaning blocks or simply standing by, hasten their pace or begin moving towards the block area. Yui, who gazes at Eiko as Teacher’s assessment is incipient, cannot contain herself as she hustles to pick blocks faster than Eiko (MM:::!, line 3).

Teacher’s public assessments are a regular way for Teacher to invite, but not demand, that other children participate in cleaning up, thereby allowing them to also have the chance to be praised. Excerpt 13 provides stronger evidence that this practice is cemented in the Teacher’s repertoire of strategies for soliciting compliance. Excerpt 13 follows from Excerpt 6, where all but one child – Akashi – are hopping around and challenging each other to jump in different ways.

Excerpt 13 (cont. from Ex. 6). Assessing and thanking to pursue directive uptake [8.20 27:56]

As Teacher finishes placing her chairs in the corner, she notices that Akashi is the only child who has continued to clean up (lines 6-7). Accordingly, Teacher suddenly increases her pitch and exaggeratedly assesses Akashi, emphasizing the assessment through her clasped hands, extreme stress, and high pitch (line 7). Throughout her assessment, several children stop jumping and begin to clean; Sho begins to pick up stray Legos, and Eiko and Wahito begin walking to the Lego table to attend to any Legos that may have been left behind. Teacher finishes her initial assessment of Akashi with a stance display (I am happy, line 8) and another assessment (As expected of Akashi, line 10). Teacher also thanks children who began to clean in response to her lengthy and upgraded assessment such as Wahito (line 12) and Uta (UTA) (line 14) as they continue to put away chairs, which was part of her original directive. Thus, Teacher’s chain of assessments and thanking of one cleaning child has the domino effect of spurring playing children to finish up the cleaning activity. This demonstrates how Teacher granularly monitored children’s compliance with the directive to clean and, conversely, how children actively attended to what behavior counted as positively assessable at that interactional juncture and reoriented themselves to align with the relevant cleaning project.

Discussion

Directives as a Resource for Socialization

The analysis of the types of directives and their distribution in directive-response sequences during the routine cleanup activities in a Japanese nursery school revealed that the teacher’s initial directive actions (i.e., Move As) made up less than half of the total number of directives that the teacher used in getting children to comply with cleaning up. Other than the initial announcement, these included actions such as noticing, Requesting*, Proposing*, Suggesting*, and pure gestural movements (e.g., pointing). The analysis found that declaratively formatted utterances, and in particular factual declaratives (Rossi, 2018) were the most common linguistic format for initial directives which required children to closely attend to their interactional import in relation to the ongoing cleanup activity.

However, often a few children showed no immediate uptake to the openings of clean up time (i.e., cleaning behavior, gaze towards the teacher, etc.). This in turn led to extended sequences where the teacher would engage in a variety of actions to pursue children’s compliance with cleaning up and transitioning to the next activity. Accordingly, the teacher more frequently employed third position moves (i.e., Move Cs) where the teacher judged children as having ignored or being significantly delayed in attending to some sequentially prior directive. These included actions such as thanking (e.g., Excerpts 11, 13), assessing (e.g., Excerpts 7, 8, 11), or using stance displays (e.g., Excerpt 13) to highlight children displaying compliant behavior (i.e., tidying away toys, putting away chairs). By positively assessing and thanking the few children who had begun to clean, the teacher provisioned the attention of other, non-cleaning children to attend to what is seen and appraised as valued and desirable behavior. In other words, non-cleaning children were indirectly invited, but not commanded, to reflect on their behavior and realign with the activity of cleaning up.

The distribution of the types and forms of directives observed may be indicative of what Clancy (1986) has called the indirect communicative style of Japanese. Importantly, studying directives in ECEC institutions provides stronger evidence for Clancy’s claim because issues of linguistic politeness more strongly permeate ECEC institutions than home life (Cook, 1997; Cook & Shibamoto-Smith, 2018). ECEC institutions such as preschool are where Japanese children must first learn to cooperate with others outside of their family and therefore outside of their comfortable ‘bubble of dependency’ (amae, cf. Doi, 1975). As opposed to the home, where cleaning and tidying up after children are often the responsibility of the primary caregiver (i.e., Mom), preschool is one such place where children begin to more frequently encounter directives, and where insubordination does not present itself as a solution (e.g., Korenaga et al., 2021). Thus, ECEC institutions may more strongly work to socialize children into attentiveness to others (omoiyari training) by keeping them accountable for attending to the interactional purpose of Teacher’s various directive formulations. While previous research on directive-response sequences has emphasized the frequency of imperatively formatted directives in adult-child interaction, the findings here show that imperatives in institutional interaction may be more significantly related to interactional contingencies, such as negotiating how to tidy away a craft (Excerpt 5), rather than as a main mode of issuing directives (cf. Rossi, 2012; Wootton, 1997).

From the teacher’s perspective, expansions such as praising and thanking cleaning children, rather than coercing non-compliant children through directly requesting or commanding, offered opportunities for non-cleaning children to be attentive to their peers’ behavior, thus indirectly socializing them into how cleaning up is a positive and valued behavior in the group. The relatively low frequency of stance displays in comparison to assessments or thanking amongst post-expansions may also indicate that cleaning is socialized as an activity that is not just for the benefit of the teacher, who is happy to receive help cleaning up, but as a good thing to do on its own merits (i.e., as a pro-moral activity).

Socialization To and Through Cleaning Up

Unlike in previous research focusing on cleanups in the home (e.g., Fasulo et al., 2007; Korenaga et al., 2021), cleaning up in nursery school has been shown to function as a scaffold for young children to understand and appreciate their role in the group and their membership in the classroom (Lebra, 1976; Peak, 1993). In the nursery school, the directive to clean up is only satisfied by a state of cleanliness or tidiness ratified by the teacher. Thus, in concurrence with Korenaga and colleagues’ (2021) findings, what cleanliness (or tidiness) looks like, and the constitutive actions that produce it, are thus implicitly socialized through the directive issuer’s (i.e., the teacher’s) final evaluation, and whether the next activity can (or will) begin hinges squarely on those issues. However, unlike Korenaga and colleagues’ findings, issues of whether the directive giver has the deontic authority to give the directive to clean up are never visible in the present data and not reported in similar contexts (e.g., Tobin et al., 1991). Hence, there is some evidence that directive-response sequences in the home may represent different socialization trajectories than those in ECEC institutions.

Another issue of consequence is whose responsibility it is to clean. In cleanup announcements, elements that accountably hold children to begin cleaning up are present (i.e., the activity contract in Excerpt 1, the routinization of the cleanup song in Excerpts 2 and 10). Others, however, are notably missing: who will do most of the cleaning up, who will clean up what, and by when cleanup must finish are underspecified in the announcement’s design. Most of the time, these issues do not seem to present problems for the participants and are tacitly understood from the children’s membership knowledge of the routines of the nursery school classroom. At the same time, these details were shown to be locally managed in each and every local project in the cleanup activity. For example, in Excerpt 9, Kazu attempts to negotiate the distribution of work by proffering the bottle cap as requested but not placing it in the cap bin himself. In this case, Teacher rejects Kazu’s partial compliance, retroactively signaling that Teacher’s assistance only goes so far and that putting it away is ultimately Kazu’s responsibility. In Excerpt 10, Riku’s reluctance to begin cleaning in the first place is shown to be an accountable (mis)behavior, revealed by Akashi’s scolding of him and his eventual compliance.

On the other hand, children were consistently observed to work collaboratively, putting away toys, stacking chairs, and tidying away crafts together to achieve a clean classroom, regardless of who had initially brought out or last played with a given toy. When items were left out, no individual or group of children were held specifically culpable by the teacher for their misplacement. In Excerpt 3, Eiko and Yui both work to find the owners of particular items (a craft and a pair of scissors) despite not having touched them during play time. Several excerpts feature the stacking of chairs left out by other children who failed to put them away before moving away from the table (i.e., Excerpts 6, 13). Cleaning up thus became a locus for children’s socialization into the boundaries of responsibility. In contrast to Western views of cleaning up as the responsibility of individuals (e.g., Tobin et al., 1991, pp. 132-133), responsibility for cleaning is socialized to lie within the group, including the teacher, who actively participated in putting away toys and rearranging furniture. These minute interactional negotiations are examples of how the teacher implicitly socialized children into responsible behavior. Conversely, children worked to explore and push the boundaries of what they are accountable for through their (dis)alignment with the teacher’s directives to clean up.

Conclusion

In this article, based on moment-by-moment analyses of the cleanup activities in a Japanese nursery school, Floyd and colleagues’ (2020) anatomical model of recruitments was applied to quantify and categorize the embodied practices and resources used by the teacher in directive-response sequences. Through quantification, the analysis showed that the teacher’s use of third position expansion moves such as assessing, thanking, and displaying stance were more frequent than first position directives in the project of getting children to clean up. Additionally, among the first position directives issued, a majority of them were indirect and worked to build children’s knowledge of the desired and valued behavior in the interactional context. Actions such as publicly noticing untidied objects or doing ‘wonder alouds’ that describe positive cleaning behavior successfully drew non-compliant children’s attention and facilitated their subsequent engagement in cleaning behavior. Finally, qualitative analysis revealed how these directive formats and practices were implemented in the sequential unfolding of directive-response sequences, ultimately highlighting how children monitor and react to the emerging contingencies of the cleanup activity. The analysis further showed how directives are a potent tool for children’s socialization into culturally ratified systems of aesthetics and morality – in this case tidiness and responsibility, respectively. Future research will have to address how these early trajectories of socialization, both to and through the directives of caregivers, continue as Japanese children begin to enter other ECEC institutions such as primary school and extracurricular clubs.

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Data, Code and Materials Availability Statement

The tabulated and coded data can be accessed in an OSF repository https://osf.io/ngz7m.

Ethics Statement

Data collection and project design ethics were approved by the University of Osaka’s Research Ethics Committee (Ref: Kenron B-8) July 8^th, 2024. All participants gave informed written consent before taking part in the study.

Acknowledgements

This research was made possible thanks to the financial support from the Japan Society Promotion of Science (https://www.jsps.go.jp/) and academic support from the University of Osaka. Appreciation is also due to my advisor Matthew Burdelski, to the group working on directive-response sequences at the Australian National University, and to the editor and two anonymous reviewers, all of whose thorough comments were helpful in revising the paper. A final word of thanks is owed to the staff and teachers at Vineyard Nursery School for warmly welcoming me into their school for a summer. Any mistakes that remain are my own.

Appendix A – Transcription Conventions

Adopting a system developed by Rue Burch (e.g., Burch, 2014), transcription consists of 4 separate lines, ordered vertically and aligned temporally through the use of markers. From top to bottom, they are: descriptions of embodied action, talk transcribed in Romanized English, an interlinear gloss, and a translation into idiomatic English. Embodied actions are organized temporally in a radial fashion relative to the talk line, where embodied actions that occur earlier in the turn appear closest to the talk line and those that occur later appear farther from it. Additional abbreviations and transcription conventions are located in the legend key below.

Appendix B – Gloss Conventions

Appendix C – Categories for Quantitative Analysis

Because a TCUs grammatical composition and its interactional import are distinct from each other, each category of the quantitative tabulation is based purely on the grammatical composition of each TCU identified as a directive. Each category is operationalized below.

1. Declaratives are TCUs which express a proposition.

2. Imperatives are TCUs in which the verb take one of two imperative forms: the gerundive Vte or the frozen imperative Vnasai (V+do-HON). Other imperative forms were not observed in the data.

3. Prototypical request forms are TCUs in which the main predicate contain one of two verbs in their honorific conjugation, either as the primary or auxiliary verb of the clause: (N / Vte) onegaishimasu (request-HON) and honorific (Vte) kudasai (give). This includes other honorific varients of (Vte) kudasai that appear as lexical substitutes rather than as conjugations (e.g., choodai (suru), itadaku)

4. Benefactive forms are TCUs in which the verb is connected with one of three auxiliary verbs that express a benefactive stance: (Vte) morau (receive), (Vte) ageru (give), or (Vte) kureru (receive).

5. Conditionals are TCUs in which the verb is conjugated with the conditional particle tara(ba). Only tara was observed in the data.

6. Deictics are TCUs in which only a deictic term is produced, such as kore / koko / kocchi / koo (this / here / over here / like this), sore / soko / socchi / soo (that / there / over there), and are / asoko / acchi (that over there / over there).

7. Lexicals are TCUs containing only a lexical noun phrase without a predicate.

License

Language Development Research (ISSN 2771-7976) is published by TalkBank and the Carnegie Mellon University Library Publishing Service. Copyright © 2026 The Author(s). This work is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work for noncommercial purposes without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified under the terms available via the above link to the Creative Commons website.