49

Family dinners are an ideal setting for studying interactive practices. Children often talk about their day at school, either spontaneously or when prompted by their parents (Morgenstern et al. 2021). In school settings, pupils are expected to continually reconfigure and decontextualize the knowledge they acquire. These processes also take place during family dinner interactions, enabling children to make sense of what they have learned in the family context. This study thus examines how this “secondarization process” (Bautier 2005), often implicitly expected at school, is also at work in family contexts during dinner conversations. Six filmed dinners—three in French and three in French Sign Language (LSF)—were analyzed to examine how learning processes are abstracted through interaction. Different degrees of “secondarization” were identified, according to the children’s age and the quality of their interactions with their parents.