Beyond Borders-Digital Tablets as a Resource for Pre-school Children’s Communication in a Minority Language

Abstract

In this video ethnographic study, a social semiotic approach has been used to explore how the use of digital tablets in preschools may enable children's communication in a minority language. The results show how preschool children use the emerging affordances of digital tablets in order to act as producers of minority language activities, where their prior knowledge is acknowledged. Applications such as Skype enable peers to communicate in a mutual language beyond the limitations of geographic preschool boundaries. Limitations, such as the lack of appropriate applications available in minority languages, are also discussed. Furthermore, a proposal is made to broaden the understanding of what could constitute multilingual activities.

Young children’s agency with digital technologies

“…One such paper employed naturalistic observations to observe the daily digital practices evident within a toddler's relationships (Harrison & McTavish, 2018). Another study was an ethnographic investigation of children in a preschool setting viewing technologies as supportive of children's communication (Petersen, 2018). The final paper concentrated on survey data capturing the influence of parent‐family contexts and children's demographics on children's engagement with technologies (Nikken & Schols, 2015).…”

“…Television watching in infancy was found to be disruptive to play and acted to reduce the quality and quantity of parent–child interactions (Kostyrka‐Allchorne et al, 2017), with the potential for harm in terms of cognitive and behavioural outcomes, language development and attentional capacity (Christakis, 2009; Christakis et al, 2013). Petersen’s (2018) ethnographic study focused on children's use of tablet technologies showing the ‘emerging affordances of digital tablets’ (p. 88) to support children's communication in a minority language.…”

App-Genres for Children’s Agency – Affordances in Applications Used in Preschool

“…In this study, 20 applications were chosen for analysis to answer the research questions concerning each application's affordances in relation to children's agency and multilingual competencies and which genres emerged from these affordances. The selection of applications is based on three previous studies exploring the use of digital tablets in preschool (Petersen, 2015(Petersen, , 2018(Petersen, , 2020, where these applications were the most commonly used in the participating preschools. This became the criterion for selecting the applications explored in this study, since no comprehensive survey on the applications used in Swedish preschools has been conducted.…”

Social Media Web 2.0 Tools Adoption in Language and Literacy Development in Early Years: A Scoping Review

“…When investigating social media integration in language and literacy development in ECE, scholars have primarily focused on describing how teachers used social media tools to structure their literacy instruction or play-based classrooms [ 8 , 10 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 ]. While some scholars zoomed in on one classroom to provide a rich description [ 8 , 39 , 41 ], others have intentionally explored multiple cases to illustrate the complexity around the digital transformation of early literacy instruction [ 10 , 40 , 42 ]. While most studies explored the learning of a dominant language, Peterson [ 41 ] explored using Skype to increase preschoolers’ opportunities to participate in minority language activities beyond school borders in a multilingual context.…”

“…While some scholars zoomed in on one classroom to provide a rich description [ 8 , 39 , 41 ], others have intentionally explored multiple cases to illustrate the complexity around the digital transformation of early literacy instruction [ 10 , 40 , 42 ]. While most studies explored the learning of a dominant language, Peterson [ 41 ] explored using Skype to increase preschoolers’ opportunities to participate in minority language activities beyond school borders in a multilingual context.…”