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This contribution focuses on the notion of partnership with parents and in particular on the concrete practices carried out during meetings between parents and early childhood professionals. To investigate the linguistic and interactional processes of these meetings, video recordings are used in order to mobilise a perspective of interactional analysis. The empirical data concern a meeting with parents as well as the analyses conducted in a training session concerning a second meeting with parents. This approach enables to combine the perspectives of the research with those of the professionals in the field. The meetings under investigation are focusing on episodes during which professionals perform an emphasis on specific words, gestures and facial expressions. The interactional perspective adopted for describing these behaviors enables to better understand these phenomena of emphasis and to reflect on their specificities and functions in the field of early childhood education.