Current LISO Events

Mallory Woods (Education, UCSB)

 

"Translanguaging and format-tying as resources for preschoolers’ topic maintenance and participation in extended multi-party classroom narratives"

 

Children’s acquisition of narrative and extended discourse skills in their preschool years is an important foundation of emergent literacy (Nicolopoulou, McDowell, & Brockmeyer 2006: 125; see also Blum-Kulka et al., 2004; Cekaite et al. 2014; Dickinson & Tabors, 2001; Snow, l999). This paper combines a translanguaging framework with C. Goodwin’s (2018) co-operative action framework and M.H. Goodwin’s (1990) construct of “format-tying”  to understand how children can be supported in participating in multi-party co-constructed narratives in multilingual classrooms.  Data are drawn from a one-year ethnography of a bilingual Spanish-English preschool classroom in Southern California involving participant observation and video and audio recordings.Two multi-party, co-constructed classroom narratives are analyzed.  One is a collective narrative recall of a story read to the children from a bilingual book, Paletero Man. The second is a conversational narrative occurring at the breakfast table. In both narratives, children “inhabit one another’s (and their teacher’s) actions” (Goodwin 2018) through using with transformation the resources provided by their peers and teacher in prior turns.  Children transform prior turns through adding semantically or grammatically related verbal, gestural, prosodic, and translingual elements and enhancements.  The analysis shows how format tying becomes a resource for children to participate, belong, and “show that their minds are together” (Goodwin 2007)  and how the teacher’s modeling of fluid translanguaging creates a supportive space for this collaborative narrative- and meaning-making to happen in the multilingual classroom. 

 

Munira Kairat (Education, UCSB)

Title TBA

 

Margarita Rodriguez (Education, UCSB)

Title TBA

 

Speaker and Title TBA