The Multimodal Construction of “Comprehensible Input”: Emergent Bilinguals’ Participation at the Preschool Writing Table

• In Event: Beyond Words: Action and Animation in Young Children’s Reading, Writing, and Playing

Abstract

The U.S. school population is becoming increasingly diverse in terms of students’ home language backgrounds, with relatively few bilingual teachers (Flynn & Hill, 2005). It is a common occurrence for young children to attend classrooms where their teachers speak only or mostly English, while they speak only or mostly another language. We know relatively little about the interactions that occur as young ELLs learn English in classrooms with monolingual English speaking teachers. This study investigates how young ELLs, in an English dominant classroom, participated at the classroom writing table. Specifically, this paper explores how prekindergarten children and their teachers flexibly combined multiple semiotic modes to build common ground for meaning making and for participating in writing.

This paper draws together theories of second language acquisition (SLA) (e.g., Krashen, 1988) emergent literacy (Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984), sociocultural learning processes (Gee, 2003), multimodality (Kress, 1997; Rowsell & Pahl, 2007) and multimodal discourse (Norris, 2004). While, SLA theorists have noted the importance of multimodality in making spoken language “comprehensible input” (Krashen, 1988) for young language learners, other modalities are described as “contextual support” (Cummins, 1994) for language. SLA research has described language patterns, but has given less attention to other modes. This paper argues that the coordination of multimodal resources for communication is a hallmark of effective participation in classroom writing events for emergent bilinguals and their teachers. Human interaction is inherently multimodal, involving participants in reading, giving off, foregrounding, and backgrounding messages in multiple modes.

Author1 collected data through participant/observation at the classroom writing table two mornings per week for one school year, collecting fieldnotes, audio and video recordings, and photographs of student writing. Fieldnotes were analyzed using the constant comparative method (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) and multimodal discourse analysis (Norris, 2004) was used to develop descriptions of multimodal interaction and composing.

Participants were 20 U.S., public school, prekindergarten students, their teachers, and Author1 as a researcher/teacher. All students were emerging bilinguals/biliterates from low-income homes. The classroom teachers and researcher were English speakers with some knowledge of Spanish. English was, by district mandate, the language of instruction.

Analyses show that even when children produced little English they drew on a variety of multimodal resources for meaning making that allowed them to participate in classroom writing events. Only a portion of that knowledge involved shared understandings of English. Other sources for shared meaning making were references to previously shared activities, embodied activity (gesture, facial expression, body posture), material objects (things, people, books, images), writing table routines, other classroom literacy routines, stories read aloud, and a growing body of understandings about print and drawing processes.

This paper argues for the importance of recognizing the ongoing production of multimodal cue complexes as an inherent part of learning to speak and write. Multimodal discourse analysis shows that language-focused descriptions of SLA such as “silent period or “preproduction” (Krashen, 1988) fail to effectively describe the full range of communicative work underway for emergent bilinguals and their teachers. Theoretical and research implications will be discussed.

Author

• Deborah Rowe, Vanderbilt University