"Mira. ¡Está squishy!" An Emergent Bilingual Child's Object-Sourced Transmodal Practices to Enhance His Play Narratives

• In Event: 67.035 - Multimodality in Bilingual Learners' Practices

Abstract

This case study explores how an emergent bilingual preschooler used his developing transmodal competence to engage with artifacts in sociodramatic play. Video recordings and field notes were collected in a dual language preschool classroom to examine the actional, verbal, and visual modes used by the focal child during his engagement with artifacts. An action-oriented analysis using multimodal discourse and mediated action frameworks revealed how he transmodally engaged with artifacts to embody imagined roles and extended artifacts’ functionality in play. Translanguaging served as an additional compositional resource to showcase his expertise of artifacts’ affordances, his bilingualism, and other modal resources to enrich his object-sourced play. Findings have implications for ways that early childhood teachers can promote and augment multimodal play scenarios.

Authors

• Alain Bengochea, University of Nevada - Las Vegas

• Sabrina Francesca Sembiante, Florida Atlantic University

• Mileidis Gort, University of Colorado - Boulder