Multimodality as Social Interaction: Emergent Bilingual Adolescents Collaborating in and Around an Online Space

• In Event: Harnessing Agency: Children and Youth Translanguaging and Playing With Multimodal Literacies

Abstract

This paper examines the communicative practices of emergent bilingual adolescents during an online writing project. Specifically, the paper traces student online academic text development across a variety socially-situated interactions and modes of representation. The paper addresses the following questions: 1) How do emergent bilingual students develop academic texts from the assemblage of semiotic resources? 2) How do students’ online and offline peer interactions shape this assemblage process?

For over a decade, the New London Group’s (1996, 2000) Pedagogy of Multiliteracies has greatly influenced literacy education. The Multiliteracies framework favors a literacy pedagogy that recognizes multilingualism as well as other non-linguistic modes of communication, including sound, gesture, and image (Kress, 2010). While this multimodal, multiliteracies approach has illuminated our understanding of contemporary issues in communication, some scholars argue that such a text or mode-centric approach to literacy pedagogy ignores the social processes and interactions in which semiotic resources are embedded (Kleifgen, forthcoming; Leander & Boldt, 2013). This paper builds on this critique by putting students and their social interaction at the center of multimodal inquiry.

This paper focuses on the semiotic work of four Latino, emergent bilingual students from a New York City middle school. During six instructional sessions, the students studied the US Civil Rights Movement through multimodal curricular resources, which included photographs, videos and historical documents. As they discussed the multimodal resources with peers and instructors, the students took notes and developed academic essays in an online writing space. Students accessed the online space using one-to-one laptops.

Students’ online navigation and written texts were recorded using screen capture software. Students’ offline conversation and non-verbal interactions were recorded with digital video cameras. Video and screen capture recordings were synchronized and transcribed together, using ELAN, a video annotator. This synchronized analysis allowed for the spoken, written and nonverbal interactions to be transcribed within a context of moment-by-moment unfolding actions (Leander & Boldt, 2013). Multimodal transcripts were analyzed using Conversation Analysis and Multimodal Discourse Analysis techniques that account for turn-by-turn moves between participants as well as mode-specific discourse structures.

Analysis of students’ online and offline interactions revealed that students mediated their interpretations of multimodal curricular resources through peer collaboration and translanguaging practices that combined academic English, Spanish and African American English. These practices were particularly salient during the students’ analysis of curricular resources that lacked native-language supports. During these collaborative moments, students developed their own interpretations of the resources by pooling notes, background knowledge and multilingual skills. These findings demonstrate the importance of peer interactions and emic language practices as mediating tools in the resource assemblage process. The paper directly challenges depictions of the student writer composing alone at her desk. Instead it reveals how students collaborate together using multiple modes of communication to assemble resources and construct new meaning potentials.

Author

• Briana Ronan, California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo