Investigating the transition from the personal signs of drawing to the social signs of writing (original) (raw)
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Language and Literacy, 2019
In this paper, we report on the first phase of an initiative we undertook to develop a classroom tool to document and describe children’s emergent writing. Here, we describe the process through which we developed an analytic framework to assist us in identifying patterns in young Indigenous and non-Indigenous children’s graphic representations in response to three formal tasks. Participating children lived in 11 northern, rural communities in two Canadian provinces. The resulting patterns, consistent with those described in the literature on children’s emergent writing, suggest the need to explore further how children use the verbal mode while representing meaning graphically.
People communicate and make meaning through the use of the signs, codes and rules of their community and its language/s. On the way to learning these signs, codes and rules, children often create or invent their own unique and sometimes temporary systems of meaning making. In this paper we use Vygotsky’s concept of semiotic mediation and Bernstein’s code theory to reflect on some examples of children’s creative approaches to communication that involved the creation and use of signs. We will argue that young language learners’ invention of their own languages and creative use of drawing as a form of sign creation are symbolic expressions of their intent to generate and reinforce desired social and cultural situations of learning. We conclude that individuals mediate social and individual functioning in order to make meaning of their world, and argue for a move away from viewing second language learning and emergent writing as static sets of abilities to a more dynamic interpretation.
Routledge Companion to Disability and Media, 2020
Book Chapter In K. Ellis, G. Goggin et B. Haller (dir.). 2020. Routledge Companion to Disability and Media. Londres et New York : Routledge. Alfred Metallic, who wrote and defended the first Indigenous-language thesis in Canada, reflected on the fundamental importance of his First Nations' language, Mi'gmaw in producing knowledge: "Our language, it's how we maintain our relations and how we understand where we come from. It gives you access to your place in the world." i Reading his words, I realize once again the importance of language in building minoritized epistemologies. ii Maybe one day, I'll will submit a chapter in sign language and you would read me with a book reader technology, watching a video of someone signing Quebec Sign Language or international signs, reading or listening to captions. For now, I'll write with these words, the ones I write and you read, the one that represent the oral languages of hearing people.
An Experiential Note on Symbols in Emergent Literacy
When does a child become literate? This question is very difficult to answer. We cannot identify a particular time before which a child is illiterate and after which he has become a literate individual. A child is a traveller of a lifelong journey of literacy. This journey begins soon after the child is born. As literacy is a complex socio-psycho-linguistic activity (Teale & Sulzby, 1989), society, home environment, school environment plays a great role in the development of literacy. Babbling, conventional speech, reading, scribbling, writing are some of the stages through which the concept of emergent literacy can be understood. The complete gamet of emergent literacy revolves around symbols that children create, use, redefine, destroy and redesign. Symbol making is man's one of the primary activities (Langer, 1942). At a very early stage child starts understanding the world around him and communicate with the world by means of different symbols. In generic sense, his expressions, reactions act as his symbols. Symbol of fear, anger, hunger, comfort, preference, happiness etc. Also, he receive such symbols from the world around him and act accordingly. When a child is pointing out something to demand for or to indicate something, he is actually using his gestures as symbols to communicate. The very function of language, i.e. to communicate or to express, is served, at this stage, through gestures. In emergent literacy stage, a child often uses symbols of different forms. Gestures are very effective way of communicating meaning at early stage. In preschool different poems are sung with gestures in parallel with the sound. This helps to build the vocabulary with meaning of certain important or repetitive words in the poem. Even when asked a children to share his experience or to discuss on some topic, they use the gestures to communicate. In my office, there is a small boy, Ayush, son of our cook. Because of lack of linguistic exposure in his early childhood, his language acquisition was delayed. One day, Ayush was coming back from preschool, wearing raincoat, when he saw me. He ran to me and say " Dada, I wore raincoat ". Actually he wanted to say, " Now, I can wear the raincoat ". When I acknowledged his newly attained skill and asked him about how to wear the raincoat, he said with gesture of buttoning from first to the fourth button, " Like this, like this, like this and like this ". Later I asked him about how to remove the raincoat. Then he just reversed the action for the same set of words. He used gestures and his early language skills and achieved what he wanted to achieve. When we conduct some activities with kids and ask them to draw images on that activity, they use different symbols. They do not care about the detailing of images. For them a circle can be a boy and a next circle can be his home. When some of my colleagues were working with preschool kids they encounter following experiences – After making a lemon juice for all the children, Dhammanand, my colleague asked kids to draw what they did. Some of them drew circles for different ingredients and utensils but some children focussed on particular characteristic for these objects. Few children distinguished the images of objects with their sizes, few drew those images from different perspectives (front view, side view, top view etc.) When Tukaram, my one more colleague, asked children to write down a traditional story (Rabbit and tortoise) which he shared with them; Mayur refused to write the story. Instead he said that he would write a story on ghosts. Tukaram mentioned that Mayur always wanted to hear ghost stories. He wrote the story in scribbling form and drew some images depicting his idea of ghost. After that, he narrated the story scribbled by him.
Australasian Journal of Early Childhood
Signs as semiotic tools Vygotsky's contribution to 'sign creation' and 'sign use' is based on his concept of semiotic mediation, a perspective in which human activities take place in sociocultural contexts and are mediated by communications involving the production and interpretation of signs (Vygotsky, 1962). Vygotsky understood semiotic mediation as the most fundamental form of human activity which can 'mediate
Drawings as an Alternative Way of Understanding Young Children’s Constructions of Literacy
Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 2004
As teachers seek to reflect children’s diverse experience in the subject matter they present and in the questions they explore, they must also embrace children’s multifaceted ways of knowing. Their major pedagogical challenge is to help children transform what they know into modes of representation that allow for a full range of human experience. In their lives outside of school, children ‘naturally move between art, music, movement, mathematics, drama, and language as ways to think about the world [...]. It is only in schools that students are restricted to using one sign system at a time.’ (Shortet al., 2000: 160). This study uses young children’s drawings about reading and writing as an innovative way of investigating their perceptions and understandings of literacy across the broad contexts of their lives. The study challenges the politics of classroom practices that privilege language-dependent modes of representation over other modes.
What Cree Children's Drawings Reveal About Words and Imagery in the Cree Language
Papers of the twenty-eighth Algonquian Conference, 1997
In this paper the author presents an overview of patterns wordplay found in 200 Cree children's drawings collected during his fieldwork in Kaschechewan Ontario from September 1990 to May 1991. Facsimiles of the drawings arranged into four concordances can be found in the author's PhD dissertation as well as papers published in previous issues of the Papers of the Algonquian conference. Discussion in this paper is focused on patterns of unconscious wordplay mediated by the visual imagery of each drawing in each of the four concordances. It is important to note that the drawings the author arranged into concordances were the product of social activity (the children sat together in a group and were influenced by each other in what they drew). Unconscious wordplay is attested by the presence of alliteration among the Cree and English words that denote the objects depicted in each child's drawings. This wordplay takes place mostly in Cree, with occasional code-switching into English, and reflects the languages in which the children were thinking as they were drawing. The author likens the general pattern of visual and verbal association in the drawings which the children produced when sitting together in a group to the highly visual nature of Cree words (specifically the prevalence of derivational morphemes denoting shape, motion and positionality).
The Writing behind Drawing: Lessons learned from my Kindergarten Class
2011
A traditional view of writing focuses on print as the ultimate mode, but a growing body of research finds that children can acquire and develop writing skills using other modes, such as drawing and multimedia. In this study, kindergarten students were asked to draw (as a mode of writing) in order to test and observe their process. As a result, the students were able to see themselves as meaning makers, demonstrated knowledge of and skill in creating texts, and became a “community of learners”. The study confirms drawing as an alternative mode for successfully teaching writing at the kindergarten level. The findings also support a multi-modal view of literacy and highlight the significance of social aspects and the artistic element in the success of the program.
2022. Tradition and innovation: Using sign language in a Gurindji community in Northern Australia
Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2022
In the Gurindji community of Kalkaringi in Northern Australia the shared practices of everyday communication employed by both hearing and deaf members of the community include conventionalized manual actions from the lexicon of Indigenous sign as well as some recent visual practices derived from contact with both written English and with Auslan. We consider some dimensions of these multimodal practices, including kinship signs and signs for time-reference, and discuss several notable features in these domains. The first is gender-motivated use of the left and right sides of the body in several kinship signs. The second is the use of celestial anchoring in some signs for time. The use of spatially accurate pointing also contributes to the indexical richness of these communicative practices, as do some introduced semiotic resources, such as air-writing, and Auslan fingerspelling. As the first description of Gurindji sign, we establish a basis for further understandings of how tradition and innovation are incorporated into these shared practices.