{"title":"Such tiny signs on a piece of paper. Engagement with language and literacy in a multilingual preschool class","authors":"H. Laursen, L. M. Daugaard","doi":"10.1177/14687984231175341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984231175341","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on recent literacy research that foregrounds affect and space, we trace the creation of an early literacy learning space as it emerges through a group conversation between a preschool class teacher and five multilingual children at age 5–6. Our analysis is driven by a fascination of the bodily intensity and emotional energies that arose during the activity, in which the children were to tell each other about a card on which they had drawn a king and asked their parents to write the word ‘king’ in the languages spoken at home. In this article, we ask how such small signs on a piece of paper can have such a big appeal to children and pave the way for a lot of metalanguaging. Our analysis points to a need for an expansion of a common gaze at the sign that goes beyond its communicative and referential meaning and directs attention to its aesthetic and subjective appeal as well as its intersubjective potential. Such a perspective pushes us to deepen our understanding of early literacy, acknowledging children’s affective and reflective paths leading to literacy. It also prompts us to broaden the scope of ‘the metalinguistic’ to embrace the ways it is shaped in interaction and contributes to shared experiences and involvements.","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46114268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘But dragons don’t exist, do they?’: Preschoolers’ focus in determining whether a picturebook is a non-fiction or not","authors":"Anna Backman","doi":"10.1177/14687984231161115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984231161115","url":null,"abstract":"Preschoolers are offered few opportunities to become acquainted with non-fiction books, and when they are given the possibility to read non-fiction picturebooks, these are often fictionalised in one way or another. The fictionalisation of children’s non-fiction blurs the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction picturebooks. This could mean that children’s early opportunities to experience how different kinds of books, pictures and texts can be used and produced for different purposes are also blurred. Against this background, reading activities are designed in this study in which a group of five-year-olds is introduced to fiction and non-fiction picturebooks side by side. The study aims to contribute to an understanding of how children distinguish and experience different kinds of picturebooks when they are introduced to differences between them, and answers the research question: What is in focus when preschoolers determine whether a picturebook is a non-fiction or not? The analysis shows that the depiction (whether the picturebook depicts imaginary constructs or established knowledge) is in focus when preschoolers make this determination . This gives the children in the reading activities the opportunity to experience different kinds of picturebooks, but also to question whether non-fiction picturebooks depicting imaginary constructed (‘made up’) things, characters and events are non-fiction and to evaluate the reliability of such fictionalised non-fiction picturebooks.","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44263777","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The meaning-making in kindergarten children’s visual narrative compositions","authors":"Sylvia Pantaleo","doi":"10.1177/14687984231161114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984231161114","url":null,"abstract":"During a 10-week classroom-based study in a school in western Canada, 17 Kindergarten children had multiple opportunities to learn about how elements of visual art, design and layout in picturebook artwork are fundamental to meaning-making when transacting with this format of literature. Student application of learning about the concepts under study was explored when the children viewed and discussed wordless or almost wordless picturebooks, and when they created their own artwork or visual compositions. Findings from the content analysis of the Kindergarten children’s visual narrative compositions and individual interviews revealed their understanding of how colour, point of view, framing, line to show action, line to show emotion and implied line can be used purposefully by sign-makers to represent particular meanings. Furthermore, application of Halliday’s metafunctions conceptual framework to analyze three focus students’ visual narrative compositions revealed how their semiotic work concomitantly realized the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions. Consistent with the tenets of social semiotics and sociocultural theory, the descriptions of the instructional procedures and student activities convey how the practices in the classroom shaped the students’ visual narrative compositions. The findings enrich understanding of how young children’s knowledge of various semiotic resources can enhance their understanding and interpretations of the kinds of communicative functions realized or fulfilled by various meaning-making resources, and can inform the design of their visual compositions.","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43838325","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ching-Ting Hsin, Catherine Compton-Lilly, Ming-Fang Hsieh, Di Tam Luu
{"title":"Creating books and sustaining Indigenous languages with two Atayal communities","authors":"Ching-Ting Hsin, Catherine Compton-Lilly, Ming-Fang Hsieh, Di Tam Luu","doi":"10.1177/14687984231161116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984231161116","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores a collaboration designed to support two Indigenous Taiwanese communities to combat language loss and promote Indigenous language literacy. Rather than relying on expert knowledge of literacy and language scholars, we have intentionally sought local knowledge to design and create books that introduce young children to simple phrases and basic conversational vocabulary in Atayal language. To do this, we engaged in a series of conversations with Tribal Leaders from two Indigenous Atayal communities. The full ethnographic study addresses designing, planning and creating bi/trilingual books with Atayal communities; instructional uses of bilingual/trilingual books; assessment of children’s language learning; and reflections from Atayal leaders, teachers, and parents. In this article, we examine the lessons we learned in designing and creating the books, as well as Tribal Leader, parent, caregiver, and teacher responses to the books.","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49254973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Children's spaces in pages: Examining spatiality in COVID-19-themed children's books.","authors":"Aireen Grace Andal","doi":"10.1177/14687984221118981","DOIUrl":"10.1177/14687984221118981","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines spatiality in selected children's books about COVID-19. Spatiality is an important lens because the coronavirus pandemic is a crisis related to distancing and mobility restrictions-spatial matters. Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined communities was adopted as a framework to how children's books present community belongingness within the spatial restrictions imposed during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a content analysis of pandemic-related children's books published in early 2020 (<i>n</i> = 51), this paper explores the sense of community in three everyday spaces: 'inside' (home), 'outside' (outdoors), and 'in-betweens' (windows and digital space). Findings reveal a two-fold observation: (1) children's books show how the 'normal' in everyday space is disrupted; and (2) layers of imagined communities manifest within the everyday spaces depicted in the books examined. These findings offer insights that while children's literature and geography are different disciplines, there is much to be explored about spaces in children's lives from writers and illustrators of children's books. Likewise, a geographical lens can substantiate discussions in children's literature by unpacking relationships of characters based on the spaces they occupy. With these in mind, it is hoped that conversations about spatial discourses in children's books flourish from this initial exploration.</p>","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":"23 1","pages":"73-101"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9780566/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47850778","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Family learning and working in lockdown: Navigating crippling fear and euphoric joy to support children's literacy.","authors":"Lorna Arnott, Laura Teichert","doi":"10.1177/14687984221122850","DOIUrl":"10.1177/14687984221122850","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper offers a nuanced perspective of two families' lockdown literacy journeys with their young children during the COVID 19 pandemic. We present informal home learning examples stimulated by play and by school-sanctioned synchronous and asynchronous activities from homes geographically miles apart yet close in terms of shared experience. In response to the catch-up and learning loss narrative which threatens to overshadow some of the positive learning experiences taking place at home, we redirect the 'catch-up' narrative towards a nuanced understanding of family learning at home by articulating the complexity of circumstance. Methodologically, drawing on Autoethnography, we present vignettes of lockdown life from Scotland and Michigan, USA. Throughout this paper we articulate challenges with the catch-up narrative and root our conclusions in the early childhood philosophy that learning extends beyond the mind to a whole body, holistic experience.</p>","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":"23 1","pages":"35-72"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9527559/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42047687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Children's digital play as collective family resilience in the face of the pandemic.","authors":"Anne Burke, Kristiina Kumpulainen, Caighlan Smith","doi":"10.1177/14687984221124179","DOIUrl":"10.1177/14687984221124179","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this article we explore how digital play as conducted through various social media and online meeting platforms facilitated resiliency and confidence building in children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using day-in-the-life methodology and narrative inquiry, we disseminate and examine observations collected on children aged 2-10 during lockdown in a Newfoundland neighbourhood. Children utilized platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Zoom to embrace their agentic digital play in ways that repurposed the platforms to fulfil life milestones and social needs otherwise impacted and disrupted by pandemic restrictions. Through a series of vignettes and interviews, our research not only examines how such digital play benefits children and their healthy development, but how parents reacted to and assisted with their children's agentic digital platform manipulation and how this provided positive benefits and enriching experiences to the entire family. We additionally explore the conflicts and tensions both children and parents encountered in securely implementing free play via digital platforms, including fears of excess screen-time, digital dependency, and online threats, all of which risk limiting children's ability to independently explore their creativity and identities through digital play if not handled sensitively. Despite the hurdles to implementing digital play, this study exposes why it is essential for families to navigate this online terrain; this study ultimately poses that digital play and online platforms not only were beneficial to maintaining and building family resilience during the pandemic but will be vital assets in sustaining resiliency and positive mindsets moving forward with pandemic recovery.</p>","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":"23 1","pages":"8-34"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9978233/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41361682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lockdown literacies","authors":"Kate Pahl, F. Scott, M. Hall, N. Kucirkova","doi":"10.1177/14687984231161720","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984231161720","url":null,"abstract":"Lockdown literacies","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":"23 1","pages":"3 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47849022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Encountering the world with voice search: A young immigrant and emergent bilingual child’s digital literacies","authors":"Yeojoo Yoon","doi":"10.1177/14687984231155718","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984231155718","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores a 4-year-old recent immigrant and emergent bilingual child’s encounter with voice search technology to understand how assemblages among a young immigrant child, his voice, his family, digital technology, and materials create new possibilities for the understanding of ethnolinguistically marginalized children and families' literacies and digital literacies practices. Data in this article is taken from a larger ethnographic case study and drawn from the child’s home and the preschool classroom. Situated in critical posthumanist scholarship and vital materialism, I show that a child’s unbounded digital and media access and unpredictable encounters through his voice and crossing over languages take part in redistributing the hierarchy of bodies, performances, and productions. Finally, I suggest that understanding children’s use of voice search as one of their key ways of doing literacies and making meaning and noticing the unpredictable, intimate, and playful literacies can help us disrupt the traditional, assimilatory conceptualization of digital literacies.","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":"23 1","pages":"175 - 209"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42292842","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
S. A. Nkomo, Xoliswa Patience Magxala, Nicholas Lebopa
{"title":"Early literacy experiences of two children during Covid-19 lockdown in South Africa: A semi- ethnographic study","authors":"S. A. Nkomo, Xoliswa Patience Magxala, Nicholas Lebopa","doi":"10.1177/14687984231154351","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984231154351","url":null,"abstract":"As the world came to grips with the coronavirus diseases (COVID-19), educational institutions and the society at large faced the challenge of figuring out how to continue with teaching and learning in such a context. Many countries, including South Africa made efforts to help contain and suppress the spread of Covid-19. In the South African education sector, about 13 million learners and 440 000 teachers were released before the end of the first school term in March 2020. In addition, 30 000 Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres, about 100 000 teachers were also required to end their term before the official closing date. For many young learners, the lockdown period meant that they would be at home with (a) Limited access to age appropriate, fun and explicitly educational resources to play with as many shops considered resources that could be used to develop children’s sensory skills as not essential goods (b) They had limited exposure to structured learning and play as most caregivers are not qualified ECD practitioners (c) Children could not play outside, visit playgrounds and parks, yet, freedom of movement, activity and exercise is important for every child’s development and young children learn best through play and experimenting (d) Most of their curriculum content cannot be fully taught using online platforms. Given this background, through a semi-ethnographic study, the paper documents the early literacy experiences of two 3 year old children during the Covid-19 lockdown in South Africa. In addition, analysis of parents or caregivers’ feedback about their experiences in providing assistance to the young learners during the lockdown is presented. Findings of the study show that in both research contexts, literacy practices were different, but not lesser. Challenging as it was for the caregivers to support the development of literacy, the home environment provided many opportunities for learning.","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":"23 1","pages":"141 - 174"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48143337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}