What is turntaking, and why is it so important?

One notion that helps many people understand turntaking is the

comparison between ping-pong and darts. Turntaking is like a ping-pong

game in which each partner takes a turn and then waits for his partner

to take his turn. Ping-pong requires 'matching' in that each person

hits the ball in a way that the other can return. Each partner has a

turn and expects to keep the game going. In darts, there is only one

person and a board, and the person throws the darts at the board. The

point here is that a child will learn more if he is more like a

ping-pong partner than like a dart board or a dart thrower.

The kind of turntaking we are referring to can be misinterpreted in

many ways. Turntaking here refers to people-to-people interactions,

doing something directly to or with a person in a way that relates to

what that person is doing. When a teacher tells a boy to "wait his

turn" on the slide or says "it's not your turn yet, you tell your story

after Carlos," that kind of turntaking is very different from the

interactive turntaking discussed here. This sequential kind of

turntaking may contribute to social order or politeness but not directly

to building interactions between people. The terms back-and-forth or

give-and-take or reciprocal better identify the interaction central to

the turntaking we mean. Each person is responding to and affecting the

other.

What each person does on his turn is not necessarily important, as long

as it is something related to what the other did and keeps the

interaction going. You may be saying, "But I don't want interaction.

I want words, ideas, conversation, 'success'!" A key principle of

Communicating Partners is that without regular social turntaking and

sustained interactions, much of the cognitive play and language

teaching may be lost. Both the child and the adults he interacts with

regularly must be motivated and committed to interacting in an intimate

and extended give-and-take style.

For the child who often avoids learning, turntaking provides constant

opportunities to show what he knows and to practice new skills within

the context of safe, friendly feedback. If you are familiar with

children with delays, you may be aware of the often devastating gap

between competence and performance. That is, many of these children,

when viewed in practical and academic contexts, act as if they know much

less than they do. The child's success in the social and vocational

worlds may depend less on what he knows than on how he uses that

knowledge to build relationships. Our experience with adolescents and

adults with delays suggests that often their inadequate social and

communicative skills, more that their knowledge, interfere with living

and working in communities. It appears that knowledge is only as good

as the social skills for using it and turntaking is a critical social

skill.

Dr. Jim MacDonald, Becoming Partners with Children: From Play to

Conversation, 1989