Children develop their language when they explore and talk about literary texts. In this study, we explore the design of shared digital reading as a basis for critical reflection on the reading situation in an institutional context with its given opportunities and limitations. We examine six videotaped readings of one specific picture book app, with a focus on the strategies used by teachers in early childhood education and care institutions to control children's access to the medium and the types of verbal engagement (about the story and about the medium) that are generated by these different strategies. We use qualitative and quantitative analysis of video data. A qualitative categorization of the readings reveals the strategies Show, Show & Share, and Share. In analyzing the participants' verbal and multisensory engagement, we find that the Show strategy generates more utterances, especially about the story, as well as more time spent on dialogue.
This article takes its outset in findings from an ongoing research project investigating the use of digital and multimodal resources in teacher education (TE) in Norway. The material studied is mandatory assignments in different courses in TE, asking how teacher students collaborate through digital media in their production of texts for learning, and how the design of these literacy practices can be influenced through the teachers' design of the assignments.In focus group interviews the researchers found that the students preferred organizing collaborative processes through Facebook groups rather than through the university's learning management system. This created a space between formal and informal learning, often mediated by ''power users'' performing a curatorial function on behalf of the group. Furthermore, the quality of the processes seemed to depend on how the assignments were designed for different modes and for individual or group work. The tasks that inspired genuine collaborative learning were characterized by a certain complexity in terms of multimodality and technology, or professional knowledge combining academic and practical experience. In other cases tasks to be performed in groups were split between the students, and probably did not add the same value to individual learning. This is discussed as an encounter between the teachers' design of the assignments and the students' design of their learning processes. When teacher students tell us how they work with assignments, they at the same time explain how their knowledge is designed through social and textual practices. Reflections on these practices are relevant to developing their awareness of didactic design in their future profession as teachers.
Introduction and Background This article takes its starting point in the joint understanding, of multimodal social semiotics and design-oriented didactics, that learning can be understood as a social, meaning-making process. This entails modes other than written and spoken language playing important roles in students' learning in school, even in language learning. The 'multimodal turn', in which attention is focused on the interplay between modes, opens up new ways of understanding the designs of classroom activity (Kress, 2003; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006; Mills, 2010). These phenomena are not new, but our ways of thinking about them are changing or 'turning' (Jewitt, 2014a, pp. 3-4) towards giving attention to modes beyond verbal language. English as a school subject has a tradition of using visual modes in both first language teaching (Jewitt, 2014a) and second language teaching (Jakobsen, 2015; Skjelbred et al., 2017). Previous research has shown an increase in the use of images in textbooks (Bezemer and Kress, 2009). Furthermore, over recent decades, the written page has developed from a verbal to a visual unit (Baldry and Thibault, 2006; Bezemer and Kress, 2010). The visually organized one-spread layout in textbooks demands an active reader to create coherence and reading paths (Bezemer and Kress, 2009). English taught as a foreign language (EFL) or second language (L2/ESL) in Norway (where the two terms tend to be used interchangeably (see e.g. Røkenes, 2016)), has a long tradition of using multimodal resources and activities for learning, ranging from textbooks to film, music and drama (Maagerø and Simonsen, 2006; Scott and Ytreberg, 1990; Simensen, 2007). Multimodality is thus inherent in the English subject in Norway, though not an explicit part of the English subject curriculum. Over the past decade, multimodality as a concept has been gradually introduced into curricula in several countries, most notably in
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