Telling Stories Multimodally: What Observations of Parent-Child Shared Book-Reading Activities Can Bring to L2 Kindergarten Teachers&apos; Training
Author: Beaupoil-Hourdel, Pauline
Date: 2020-11-16
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Parent Child Relationship,Native Language,Second Language Learning,Child Language,Kindergarten,Preschool Teachers,Second Language Instruction,Language Usage,Books,Story Reading,Family Environment,Educational Environment,Computational Linguistics,Preservice Teachers,Guidelines,Professionalism,Classroom Communication,Semiotics,Nonverbal Communication,French,English,Longitudinal Studies,Foreign Countries,Sociocultural Patterns,Teacher Student Relationship

In teacher training curricula, books are presented as an ideal material for building and enriching young children's language. Yet, the routine of reading at home with children is hardly ever mentioned. In this chapter, the author proposes analyses of story-reading activities from a usage-based and first language acquisition perspective. The goal is to raise methodological questions for the professionalization of future kindergarten teachers who engage in L2 teaching with children aged three to six. This paper questions the links between the home and school environments in a context of L2 learning with beginners. The link between L1 and L2 acquisition is pertinent, as parents' practices and language use when interacting with children who do not master their mother tongue might inform the design of training programs for kindergarten teachers who teach a foreign language to pupils from three to six. The chapter is organized as follows. First, the author presents a review of Shared Book Reading (SBR) activities and the use of books during adult-child interaction at home and in class. Second, the author presents an analytical approach to language use and development and its application to children's linguistic and interactional competences: the author presents results from her own projects on reading at home and propose qualitative multimodal analyses of the data to account for the participation framework and content of SBR activities. Corpus-based analyses of parent-child SBR activities at home will contribute to show how the parents in the corpus naturally and spontaneously engaged in SBR activities with their children. Third, based on the analyses of the author, she draws some guidelines for the professionalization of preservice teachers who are trained in universities, keeping in mind that the ecology of reading books at home significantly differs from that of reading books in class. In this chapter the author aims to theorize parents' spontaneous behavior in order to provide professional guidelines for teachers in the context of story-reading activities in a second language in class with children who cannot read yet. The analyses focus on how meaning is co-constructed by the adult, the child, the story in the book, and the surrounding environment by taking into consideration all the semiotic resources that the speakers have at their disposal (vocal productions, words, actions, gestures, and facial expressions). To analyze how meaning is constructed in this context, particular attention is paid to the book itself, its written and visual contents, as well as how it is manipulated by the participants. [For the complete volume, &quot;Language Learning and Professionalization in Higher Education: Pathways to Preparing Learners and Teachers in/for the 21st Century,&quot; see ED608931.]