Children’s multimodal participation in interactions and dialogues
across different activities in an early childhood education and care
setting
Early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings are
challenging contexts for children to engage in conversations. According to
previous studies, toddler participation is minimal. However, most studies have
focused on vocal productions. This study investigates how gestures also enable
children to participate in interactions. From video recordings of three types of
activities (mealtime, playtime, booktime) in a French ECEC, we systematically
categorised utterances as being vocal, gestural or multimodal. One third of the
utterances was produced by children. In mealtime and playtime, most utterances
contained a vocal production, while in booktime, most contained a gesture.
Gestural utterances were only addressed to professionals. The qualitative
analysis of two sequences further highlights how gestures enable the building of
joint attention, the co-construction of dialogic exchanges and the engagement of
some children as observers. Taking gestures into account sheds new light on
children’s participation in interactions and dialogues in ECEC.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical orientations, methodological implications, and challenges for the
current study
- 3.Child participation in ECEC interactions
- 3.1Child (vocal) participation low in ECEC interactions
- 3.2Activities impact language use and child participation in
interactions
- 3.3Multimodality sporadically taken into account in the study of ECEC
interactions
- 4.The current study
- 4.1Hypotheses
- 4.2Collected data
- 4.3Transcription
- 4.4Coding
- 4.5Inter-rater agreement
- 4.6Analysis
- 5.Multimodality and participation as speakers and addressees: A quantitative
perspective
- 5.1Speakers’ identity and modality of children’s utterances across
activities
- 5.2Addressees across activities and modality of children address
- 5.3Relationship between addressing children and children’s utterance
modality
- 6.Multimodality in the co-construction of dialogues: An interactional and dialogic
perspective
- 6.1Language modality and requests during snack time
- 6.2Language modality and the building of discursive spaces during a booktime
sequence
- 7.Discussion
- 7.1Who produces language across activities?
- 7.2Whom do toddlers and professionals address across activities?
- 7.3What modality do children use when participating in interactions?
- 7.4Limitations and future directions
- 8.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Author queries
-
References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.