Abstract:

This presentation shares the framework used for analysis and some of the findings of a research project looking at children's classroom communication. Whilst not solely concerned with Literacy it looks at children's multimodal text construction and discusses the meaning of 'text' in the multimodal, multimedia age. Communication in any setting takes place through the use of many modes of meaning making, of which language is one. The basis for this presentation is a research project examining the ways that children in a year five mixed English primary school (aged 9-10) communicated in face to face interactions with other children working in groups on class based activities. The aim of my analysis is to focus on ‘the minute moment to moment negotiations of meaning in children’s dialogues’ (Maybin, 2006: 184) examining all modes, not just language, in order to answer my questions. This paper shares the theoretical basis for the framework developed for the multimodal analysis of classroom discourse.
This analysis is grounded in a view of interaction as multimodal communicative practice. The process of analysis and interpretation combines approaches to the linguistic analysis of discourse with a social semiotic view of communication (Kress 2008). Following Norris ( 2004: 11) I have considered embodied modes such as proxemics, posture, bodily actions, gesture, gaze, spoken language and disembodied modes such as layout, print, music and any other semiotic resources used by the children as they work.
As part of the data analysis in this project a framework for the multimodal analysis of face to face interaction was devised and this presentation proposes this framework together with discussion of some of the findings relating to children's text construction it has made possible . This may be of great value to any researchers conducting analysis of discourse as part of their approach to research as this project has shown that attention to the full range of semiotic resources used in the classroom enables a thicker description of what is taking place. Furthermore, an analysis based on language use alone may potentially miss aspects of the communication, learning and understanding that take place in the classroom.

Keywords:

Multimodal analysis, classroom communication.