Dinners constitute an ideal stage for participants to talk about the here and now -proximal discourse - but also to narrate the events of the day, collectively remember past events, make plans, or argue - distal discourse - (Dancygier, 2019). Participants dynamically switch to discourse that spans beyond the dinner time and more specifically the children’s day apart from parents in school (Morgenstern et al. 2021). In this study, we center on how distal events and topics revolving around school are incorporated and embodied at the dinner table through objects, discourse and gesture.

Using ELAN, we coded all discourse topics in 8 hearing and speaking family dinners, the length of each sequence and whether discourse was proximal or distal. We compared linguistic features (words/signs/gestures types and tokens, length of turn, syntactic complexity, speech act variety, types of gestures, body parts involved, gaze and participation framework). We then focused on discourse about school and coded all the semiotic resources used during the sequences.

As expected, we found that in our French speaking and LSF signing families, focus on school is often initiated by parents’ eager questions, as they are curious to elicit information about their children’s autonomous experiences. The distal events are then embodied through gestures, actions and postures in long and lively sequences, and even materialized when children bring their school objects to the dinner table. Deaf and hearing children often capture all family members’ attention. But school can also be materialized incidentally in the here and now through free associations with dining activities and deviant uses of forks, tooth picks, radishes, peas, croutons and cheese floating on soup. School life is thus integrated in French middle-class family life by parents who position themselves as co-educators and children who are dynamically socialized to being reflective multimodal learners and “languagers”.