Seventh International Conference on Immersion and Dual Language Education

Strand I: Pedagogy & Assessment

Spanish and English

Pre-K

Introduction: Show-and-Tell (S&T) represents a typical preschool activity in early childhood (EC) classrooms where children communicate in a variety of ways to share personally-meaningful artifacts with peers and teachers (Christie, 1990). Authors (2015) previously identified three distinct purposes of S&T presentations that are characteristic of school genres: to describe, to explain, and to recount. Previous studies allude to the importance of multimodal practices in supporting children’s engagement in this activity, such as presenters’ demonstration of the focal object, spatial positioning (Oken-Wright, 1988), manipulation (Michaels, 1981), and performance and gesturing (Heath, 1983). Since EB children use their multimodal resources to add variety, complexity, and meaning to their participation in literate discourses (Authors, 2015), examining their multimodal practices in S&T activity elucidates how their use of communicative resources—actions, languages, and objects—supports their enactment.

Theoretical Framework: Guided by mediated discourse analytic perspectives, our study is grounded in the assumption that learners intersperse and interweave available semiotic resources (e.g., linguistic, paralinguistic, and extralinguistic) to engage in meaning-making and realize the purposes of their (inter)actions with others (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001). Using multiple resources (i.e., modes) for communication—language, actions, and visuals—to participate in broader forms of literacy, children produce various signs through transmodal expressions to communicate and represent their ideas (Wohlwend, 2008).

Method: The current analysis emerged from a larger, two-year ethnography of the language and literacy practices of EB preschoolers and their teachers as they engaged in various learning activities in an EC Spanish/English dual language program in a multilingual/multicultural community in the southeastern U.S. The program’s language distribution policy is to alternate weekly the target instructional language (English or Spanish). Two teachers lead each preschool classroom, one modeling English and the other Spanish. We documented six S&T sessions (three in English, three in Spanish), which lasted an average of 22 minutes, with children’s presentations (N = 19) lasting an average of two minutes. We analyzed video data of S&T activity in two bilingual preschool classrooms for the actional modes (e.g., gesture, posture, movement, and manipulation of objects), visual modes (e.g., the use of image and print; shifting gaze), and verbal modes (trans/languaging practices, turn-taking, response/initiation) used by EB children. Analyses reveal that EB children draw on their multimodal resources in different ways to support each of the three purposes of S&T presentations: describing the focal object’s physical attributes, explaining the object’s use, or recounting an object-related event or experience.

Findings: One of our major findings revealed that presenters vary their engagement with their multimodal resources depending on the influence, engagement, and reaction of the audience and the teacher to whom the child is presenting. A second finding suggested that the physical attributes and nature of a presenter’s toy changed the ways that both presenters and peers in the audience engaged with the object and how it was employed during the presentation. Children differentially used their multimodal resources depending on toys’ affordances, such as its color, size, shape, and actional potential (e.g., less and more mobile toys). Notable patterns were observed in their peers’ engagement and the presenters’ language use (e.g., greater use of commands) in those presentations in which objects were physically and steadily accessible to peers, commonly found among mobile, more easily transferred objects. Lastly, we found that children’s translanguaging practices shifted across the presentation types; although presenters predominantly used English to relay their meaning, they engaged their receptive bilingual skills to understand and respond to teachers’ [Spanish-language] prompts.

Implications: Due to preschool-age emergent bilingual children’s varying multimodal use according to presentation purposes (i.e., focusing on the object, process, or event) and object attributes, findings suggest a number of practical implications for structuring S&T activities to enhance transmodal communication with presenters and among students. More specifically, teachers can facilitate and support presenters during and across varying presentation purposes through transmodal elicitation moves. Based on our first findings, teachers can invite audience interaction in meaningful ways to enhance students’ S&T interactions, such as by varying their statements and questions to encourage children to engage their multimodal resources differently in support of describing their toy, explaining its use, or recounting an event related to the object.  Secondly, teachers can become aware of the different affordances of objects that children choose to share during S&T, support children complement verbally expressed ideas about objects with actional and visual modes by recognizing toys’ affordances and typical functions, and invite different types of toys to vary interaction and experience during the activity. Lastly, teachers can help children engage in the target language of the activity by modeling and encouraging flexible languaging practices—using translanguaging as an additional resource—which may also play a scaffolding role in children’s developing biliteracy.

Presentation Plan: We aim to spend a short amount of time first presenting findings from our study around how children use their linguistic resources with other modes to support the purpose/s of their S&T presentations. We then intend to dedicate the majority of our presentation to discussing innovative practices that emerge from the implications of these findings. In particular, we address how teachers can promote EB preschoolers’ communicative competence and biliteracy development through the S&T activity through attention to the following questions: (a) How can teachers capitalize on engagement strategies to maximize students' opportunities for language production in S&T? (b) How do teachers personalize learning to meet the needs of all students during S&T activities? (c) How can teachers effectively collaborate across languages and disciplinary areas during S&T to foster biliteracy development and increase coherence across the curriculum?