Multimodal Perspectives Of Language Literacy And Learning In Early Childhood

Our image-rich, media-dominated culture prompts critical thinking about how we educate young children. In response, this volume provides a rich and provocative synthesis of theory, research, and practice that pushes beyond monomodal constructs of teaching and learning. It is a book about bringing “sense” to 21st century early childhood education, with “sense” as related to modalities (sight, hearing), and “sense” in terms of making meaning. It reveals how multimodal perspectives emphasize the creative, transformative process of learning by broadening the modes for understanding and by encouraging critical analysis, problem solving, and decision-making. The volume’s explicit focus on children’s visual texts (“art”) facilitates understanding of multimodal approaches to language, literacy, and learning. Authentic examples feature diverse contexts, including classrooms, homes, museums, and intergenerational spaces, and illustrate children’s “sense-making” of life experiences such as birth, identity, environmental phenomena, immigration, social justice, and homelessness. This timely book provokes readers to examine understandings of language, literacy, and learning through a multimodal lens; provides a starting point for constructing broader, multimodal views of what it might mean to “make meaning;” and underscores the production and interpretation of visual texts as meaning making processes that are especially critical to early childhood education in the 21st century.

Making Meaning is a synthesis of theory, research, and practice that explicitly presents art as a meaning making process. This book provokes readers to examine their current understandings of language, literacy and learning through the lens of the various arts-based perspectives offered in this volume; provides a starting point for constructing broader, multimodal views of what it might mean to “make meaning”; and underscores why understanding arts-based learning as a meaning-making process is especially critical to early childhood education in the face of narrowly-focused, test-driven curricular reforms. Each contributor integrates this theory and research with stories of how passionate teachers, teacher-educators, and pre-service teachers, along with administrators, artists, and professionals from a variety of fields have transcended disciplinary boundaries to engage the arts as a meaning-making process for young children and for themselves.

CONTENTS Language Policy and Literacy Instruction, Olivia N. Saracho and Bernard Spodek. Historical Perspectives in Language Policy and Literacy Reform, Olivia N. Saracho and Bernard Spodek. Second Language Issues in Early Literacy and Instruction, Elizabeth S. Pang and Michael L. Kamil. The Acquisition of Literacy: Reframing Definitions, Paradigms, Ideologies, and Practices, Mary Renck Jalongo, Beatrice S. Fennimore, and Laurie Nicholson Stamp. The Teacher of Beginning Reading, Robert C. Calfee and Linda Scott Hendrick.Effective Early Reading Programs for English Language Learners, Robert E. Slavin and Alan Cheung. Language Learners, Early Literacy and Reading Policy Reform, Paula Wolfe and Betsy J. Cahill. Children’s Literature and Children’s Literacy: Preparing Early Literacy Teachers to Understand the Aesthetic Values of Children’s Literature, Barbara Z. Kiefer. A Critical Examination of India’s National Language Policy in Primary Education, Jyotsna Pattnaik. Issues in Early Childhood Education for English Learners: Assessment, Professional Training, Preschool Interventions and Performance in Elementary School,David Yaden, Robert Rueda, Tina Tsai, and Alberto Esquinca. Bilingualism is not the Arithmetic Sum of Two Languages, Eugene E. García. Educating the Next Generation: Culture Centered Teaching for School-Aged Children, Esther Elena López and Michael William Mulnix. Language Policy in the United States: An Historical and Contemporary Perspective, Olivia N. Saracho and Bernard Spodek.

Questions are often raised asking whether the learning of two or more languages in early childhood is an advantage in terms of the academic, cognitive and social benefits, or whether it causes confusion and difficulty for the child. This book explores language learning in early years education in a wide range of geographical contexts with a focus on second language learning and bilingualism. Drawing on a synthesis of theory, research and practice, this book contributes to the existing knowledge base concerning pre-literate skills and experiences of very young children. Topics cover: Pre-school literacy development Literacy in the home Pluralingualism Technology in early language acquisition Chapters present theory and research related to practice in teacher education, policy-making, country case studies, home and school based projects, code switching and language use, and methodologies and approaches. This makes the book essential reading for researchers, academics, teacher trainers, and post-graduate students alike.

International Perspectives on Digital Media and Early Literacy evaluates the use and impact of digital devices for social interaction, language acquisition, and early literacy. It explores the role of interactive mediation as a tool for using digital media and provides empirical examples of best practice for digital media targeting language teaching and learning. The book brings together a range of international contributions and discusses the increasing trend of digitalization as an additional resource in early childhood literacy. It provides a broad insight into current research on the potential of digital media in inclusive settings by integrating multiple perspectives from different scientific fields: (psycho)linguistics, cognitive science, language didactics, developmental psychology, technology development, and human–machine interaction. Drawing on a large body of research, it shows that crucial early experiences in communication and social learning are the basis for later academic skills. The book is structured to display children’s first developmental steps in learning in interaction with digital media and highlight various domains of early digital media use in family, kindergarten, and primary schools. This book will appeal to practitioners, academics, researchers, and students with an interest in early education, literacy education, digital education, the sociology of digital culture and social interaction, school reform, and teacher education.

Storytelling in Early Childhood is a captivating book which explores the multiple dimensions of storytelling and story acting and shows how they enrich language and literacy learning in the early years. Foregrounding the power of children’s own stories in the early and primary years, it provides evidence that storytelling and story acting, a pedagogic approach first developed by Vivian Gussin Paley, affords rich opportunities to foster learning within a play-based and language-rich curriculum. The book explores a number of themes and topics, including: the role of imaginary play and its dynamic relationship to narrative; how socially situated symbolic actions enrich the emotional, cognitive and social development of children; how the interrelated practices of storytelling and dramatisation enhance language and literacy learning, and contribute to an inclusive classroom culture; the challenges practitioners face in aligning their understanding of child literacy and learning with a narrow, mandated curriculum which focuses on measurable outcomes. Driven by an international approach and based on new empirical studies, this volume further advances the field, offering new theoretical and practical analyses of storytelling and story acting from complementary disciplinary perspectives. This book is a potent and engaging read for anyone intrigued by Paley’s storytelling and story acting curriculum, as well as those practitioners and students with a vested interest in early years literacy and language learning. With contributions from Vivian Gussin Paley, Patricia ‘Patsy‘ Cooper, Dorothy Faulkner, Natalia Kucirkova, Gillian Dowley McNamee and Ageliki Nicolopoulou.

This book offers a comprehensive report on a three-year, cross-cultural, critical participatory action research study, conducted in children’s homes and communities in Fiji. This project contributed to building sustainable local capacity in communities without access to early childhood services, so as to promote preschool children’s literacy development in their home languages and English. The book includes rich descriptions of the young children’s lived, multilingual literacy practices in their home and community contexts. This work advances research-based practices for fostering young children’s multilingual literacy and building community capacity in a post-colonial Pasifika context; further, it shares valuable insights into processes and complexities that are inherent to multiliteracy and cross-cultural research.

A book exploring educational theory around art education with children.