"Je m'en mets toute seule". Séquences d'étayage dans les repas de famille

The article analyses examples of scaffolding activities occuring between parents and children of middle-class Italian families during dinner-time. The analysis highlights the ways through which participants engage in a scaffolding sequence, transforming the activities in the service of the consumption of the meal into occasions of childrens' socialization to appropriate behaviours and rules. The analysis is meant to describe the structure and the internal organization of the scaffolding sequences as a specific and boundary-marked activity, and to account for the methods that participants use for building and developing them as coordinated and joint activities. The analysis shows that the scaffolding sequences develop through progressive expansions of initial minimal exchanges (e. g. adjacency pairs). Particularly, the expansion of the second pair part beyond the conforming response appears to be the crucial moment for the developing of the scaffolding actitvity.