The purpose of this study was to investigate the features of two year old children's
social interaction observed in their free play time. The children's free play was observed
and video taped for 4 weeks. All of the video tape was transcribed. Through multiple
reading the transcript the theme words were found and categorized.
The results indicated that two year old children interacted with their peer as a
positive initiative interaction like a calling, mention, gesture, ask for help, giving a
physical help, making a sound related play, asking a question, demanding or order,
naming a role, sharing or exchanging, suggestion and as a negative initiative action
like a teasing, a blame. The lingual and physical interactions were observed as a
positive interaction and an ignoring was observed as a negative interaction to respond
toward these initiative interactions.
There were five features in the social interaction of children. First, there was a
repetitive question to understand of meaning of peer's initiative interaction. Second,
many children ignored their peer's try to interaction with them. Third, The length of
interaction was very short. But there was a long interaction according to the theme.
Fourth, a negative initiative interaction was seldomly observed. Fifth, they
immediately responded to the unexpectable linguistic interaction of their peer. The
Feature of social interaction of two year old children indicated the difficulty of
attention cause from egocentrism, immature of language expression ability, ability of
symbolic representation and meta-communication.