Recursive Readings and Reckonings: Kindergarteners' Multimodal Transactions With a Nonfiction Picture Book

• In Event: Theorizing Multimodality Through Children's and Youths' Perceptions and Experiences

Abstract

Objectives
Our world has always been multimodal, but how young children enact and embody literacy practices, especially reading, has often been overlooked. Additionally, there is little research examining how young children, in particular, respond to books and even fewer studies that focus on how readers respond to nonfiction picturebooks, specifically. Thus, this study’s research question was: What multimodal resources do readers use to respond to and construct meaning from nonfiction picturebooks?

Theoretical Perspectives:
This research was undergirded by Rosenblatt’s (1978) transactional theory of reading and a social semiotic approach to multimodality (Jewitt et al., 2016; Kress, 2015). Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading provided insights into how readers understand and respond to texts and how these might continue to be processed throughout the school day. Kress’s (2015) social semiotic approach to multimodality elucidated how each readers’ efforts built upon one another and were always in response to each other.

Methods/Data Sources:
This research stemmed from a five-month-long case study of one Kindergarten class’s multimodal and collective responses to nonfiction picturebooks. The findings of this research explore the multimodal interactions between three boys, Maddox, Lucas, and Jason (all names pseudonyms), as they transacted with the nonfiction picturebook New York City (Hanigan & Chandler, 2012). This nine-minute video clip of three boys making sense of one nonfiction picturebook during reading workshop was analyzed using Norris’(2019) approach to multimodal data analysis, which examines multimodal data from a bottom-up analysis (lower mediated actions) and a top-down approach (higher mediated actions). This research focused on this video because it exemplified a moment where children chose to work together to read a nonfiction book without the interruption of the teacher; all of the transactions occurred without any connections to the class curriculum, any suggestion from the teacher, and with no expectations about what the children should do as a response.

Findings:
Findings demonstrate how Maddox, Lucas, and Jason contributed their personal knowledge and worked to negotiate each other’s understandings. The boys used gestures, gaze, and proxemics to establish how they understood information, to describe new ideas in lieu of vocabulary or language, and to incorporate each other’s knowledge into their meaning-making of nonfiction picturebooks. Findings also demonstrate that in addition to reading images, the children learned to read each other.

Significance:
This research indicates that reading is inherently multimodal, recursive, and complex and provides implications for teachers to reconsider what kinds of responses they prioritize in their classrooms. Additionally, it establishes the need to better understand how readers respond to nonfiction books and a broader examination of multimodality in the literacy curriculum.

Author

• Courtney Shimek, University of Georgia