Participation frameworks and socio-discursive competence in young children: The role of multimodal strategies

Abstract

This article explores the socio-discursive competence of young children in Galician pre-schools. In particular, it deals with the way in which children – aged from 2;10 to 4;05 years – combine embodied actions and verbal resources to co-narrate stories with peers and adults. Using an audiovisual corpus of naturally occurring interactions, we have conducted a qualitative and multimodal analysis, observing how children react to diverse footings and negotiate participation frameworks in multiparty interactions. The findings suggest three progressive stages in the development of socio-discursive competence in which children use different strategies: (a) the stage of interactive proto-narrations, (b) the stage of collaborative narrations and (c) the stage of polyphonic monologue narrations. Our detailed examination reveals (a) a progressive increase in the diversity of the participation frameworks represented by children, as well as in the complexity of the multimodal resources they use, and (b) a rise in children’s grammatical repertoire linked to an improvement in children’s (meta)pragmatic skills.