Being clouds, pulling teeth and using their breadloaves : a multimodal micro-analysis of instantiations of child-to-child interaction in classroom contexts.

摘要

This study examines the ways in which children communicate and collaborateudwith one another whilst working on curriculum tasks in an educational setting. Ituduses an approach to methodology founded on Linguistic Anthropology andudLinguistic Ethnography and informed by a social-semiotic theory ofudcommunication, drawing upon field notes and video-recorded data from a class ofudnine and ten year olds at a Sheffield primary school. A framework informed byudsociolinguistic theory and multimodal analyses of communication has beenuddevised to analyse the data in such a way that the many and varied modes ofudmeaning-making employed by the children are considered. The purpose of theudstudy is to gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which children creativelyudemploy semiotic resources in their face-to-face spontaneous interactions. Theudmain findings of the study are that modes of meaning-making are integral to theudcommunicative activity and work in coordination with each other. Features whichudhave been noted in linguistic studies of interaction can be seen in this multimodaludstudy and could be classed as features of multimodal communication rather thanudlinguistic features. In addition, child-to-child classroom meaning-making isudintersubjective and collaborative. Knowledge can be presented through anyudchosen mode and can be developed collaboratively through multiple modes. Theudstudy has implications for pedagogy in that educationalists need to be aware of theudmultimodal nature of children's interactions, recognise the value of the semioticudwork of pupils and ensure opportunities for meaning-making using multipleudmodes are planned for. The implications for future research are thatudmethodological approaches need to take account of the use of all modes inudinteractions in order to gain a thicker description of what is taking place thanudcould be achieved with a language-dominant approach.ud