PDF (Accepted Manuscript)
- Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader
|Google Scholar:||Look up in Google Scholar|
Although the English Foundation Stage Curriculum for children aged 3 to 5 years recognises that children learn through talk and play and through ‘movement and all their senses’ (DfEE & QCA, 2000: 20), there is comparatively little theoretical understanding of how children learn through diverse ‘modes’, such as body movement, facial expression, gaze, the manipulation of objects and talk, and there is little practical guidance on how practitioners can support children’s ‘multimodal’ learning. Indeed, mounting research evidence indicates that since the introduction of a national early years curriculum and early years assessment schemes, practitioners have felt under increased pressure to focus on children’s verbal skills in order to provide evidence of children’s literacy and numeracy skills in preparation for primary education (see Flewitt, 2005a & 2005b).
In the context of these changes, this article relates the story of Tallulah, a 3-year-old girl with a late July birthday, who, like many summer-born children in England, spent one year in an early years setting before moving to primary school aged just 4 years. The article draws on data collected as part of an ESRC-funded study that explored the different ‘modes’ young children use to make and express meaning in the different social settings of home and a preschool playgroup (Flewitt, 2003). Examples are given of how Tallulah communicated her understandings at home through skilful combinations of talk, gaze direction, body movement and facial expression, and how others in the home supported Tallulah’s learning. These are then compared with examples of how Tallulah communicated in playgroup, primarily by combining the silent modes of gaze, body movement and facial expression. The article identifies how the different social settings of home and preschool impacted upon her choices and uses of different expressive modes.
|Item Type:||Journal Article|
|Academic Unit/Department:||Education and Language Studies > Centre for Language and Communication
Education and Language Studies
|Interdisciplinary Research Centre:||Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology (CREET)|
|Depositing User:||Rosie Flewitt|
|Date Deposited:||15 Aug 2006|
|Last Modified:||24 Feb 2016 05:01|
|Share this page:|
► Automated document suggestions from open access sources
Download history for this item
These details should be considered as only a guide to the number of downloads performed manually. Algorithmic methods have been applied in an attempt to remove automated downloads from the displayed statistics but no guarantee can be made as to the accuracy of the figures.