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

This study examines the ways in which children communicate and collaborate
with one another whilst working on curriculum tasks in an educational setting. It
uses an approach to methodology founded on Linguistic Anthropology and
Linguistic Ethnography and informed by a social-semiotic theory of
communication, drawing upon field notes and video-recorded data from a class of
nine and ten year olds at a Sheffield primary school. A framework informed by
sociolinguistic theory and multimodal analyses of communication has been
devised to analyse the data in such a way that the many and varied modes of
meaning-making employed by the children are considered. The purpose of the
study is to gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which children creatively
employ semiotic resources in their face-to-face spontaneous interactions. The
main findings of the study are that modes of meaning-making are integral to the
communicative activity and work in coordination with each other. Features which
have been noted in linguistic studies of interaction can be seen in this multimodal
study and could be classed as features of multimodal communication rather than
linguistic features. In addition, child-to-child classroom meaning-making is
intersubjective and collaborative. Knowledge can be presented through any
chosen mode and can be developed collaboratively through multiple modes. The
study has implications for pedagogy in that educationalists need to be aware of the
multimodal nature of children's interactions, recognise the value of the semiotic
work of pupils and ensure opportunities for meaning-making using multiple
modes are planned for. The implications for future research are that
methodological approaches need to take account of the use of all modes in
interactions in order to gain a thicker description of what is taking place than
could be achieved with a language-dominant approach.