As an increasingly established research field, family language policy (FLP) provides a very useful lens to view how bi/multilingual home language-use patterns are influenced by socio-political ideologies and economic factors at the macro level and by family members’ language ideology at the micro level. This chapter starts with an introduction to FLP and outlines the development phases of the field. It then provides a discussion of the major research contributions to the field. Following that, it provides a synthesis of the extant research on how FLP is established and maintained in a range of countries and contexts, particularly in multilingual families. The synthesis focuses on internal factors, such as emotion, identity and cultural practices, and child agency in the negotiation of a family language policy. Lastly, insights gleaned from the more diverse range of social contexts are taken into consideration when making implications for parents, educators, and policy makers and a call for future research.

The role of embodiment in social interactions has attracted increasing attention in the last decade, both in the area of conversation analysis and that of cognitive science. Embodiment refers to all aspects of nonverbal, bodily behaviour, such as body posture and orientation, hand movements and gaze. This chapter will explain the concept of embodiment in both cognitive science and conversation-analytically informed research on social interaction, will present a state-of-the art review of research on embodiment in childhood interaction and will make clear the implications of this research for embodied practices in interactions with children, especially for childhood educators.

Chapter 3 examines the intriguing question of how contrasting pragmatic data is possible. We argue that not every instance of interaction can be contrastively examined – rather we need to identify our tertium comparationis. In so doing, it is fundamental to consider the phenomenon of conventionalisation, i.e. the degree of recurrence of a particular pragmatic phenomenon in the language use and evaluations of members of a social group or a broader linguaculture. We argue that the cross-cultural pragmatician needs always to consider whether the phenomena to be compared are sufficiently conventionalised in the respective linguacultures or not. We discuss various situations, such as lingua franca contexts, in which conventionalisation can be a particularly complex issue to consider. We point out that conventionalisation manifests itself in two intrinsically interrelated types of language use, namely, convention and ritual, which play an important part in our analytic framework.