Abstract
Aimed at investigating primary school children’s interactional competence and cooperation practices, this arti-
cle focuses on recruitments and offers of assistance – a topic mostly studied in interactions among adults, as well
as in early childhood and adolescence, but underexplored in classroom settings with children aged 8–9. Using a multimodal conversation analytic approach, the study examines two interrelated practices through which children in Italian primary schools cooperate during classroom activities carried out in pairs and in small groups: (1) explicit requests for assistance and (2) unsolicited provisions of help intended to preempt a classmate’s potential difficulty. These practices occur both within the children’s own pair/group and beyond it. We offer initial insights into how the recruitment continuum (Kendrick & Drew, 2016) is configured by primary school children, paying particular attention to the interplay between Italian syntactic formats and the range of multimodal resources children employ to accomplish recruitment and assistance.