Abstract
With young children’s increased use of digital technologies, there is growing interest in their multimodal meaning making. Little is known of the ways that interactions between young children and adults produce multimodal meaning making as an aspect of digital literacies. This chapter explores children’s production of multimodal meaning making during their viewing of YouTube videos in a preschool. Video-recorded data are drawn from a large study of young children’s everyday practices with digital technology in preschools and in their homes. Conversation analysis is used to investigate the multimodal resources employed by the children and their teacher to accomplish individual and shared understandings of video events as humorous, out-of-the-ordinary, and even dangerous. Discussion establishes how social interaction informed viewing, made use of multimodal resources, and extended opportunities for children’s learning. The chapter contributes to thinking about practices necessary for educators to support children’s multimodal meaning making during their use of digital technologies.
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Acknowledgment
We thank the Australian Research Council, who awarded funding to Susan Danby, Amanda Spink, Karen Thorpe, and Christina Davidson for the project Interacting with Knowledge, Interacting with People: Web Searching in Early Childhood (DP110104227). The project has ethical approval by Queensland University of Technology’s University Human Research Ethics Committee (Reference No.: 1100001480) and Charles Sturt University’s Research Ethics Office (Reference No.: 2012/40). We thank the teachers, children, and families of the Crèche and Kindergarten Association for their participation in this study. We thank Sandra Grant and Sandy Houen for video recording in the preschool.
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Davidson, C., Danby, S.J., Thorpe, K. (2017). “Uh Oh”: Multimodal Meaning Making During Viewing of YouTube Videos in Preschool. In: Narey, M. (eds) Multimodal Perspectives of Language, Literacy, and Learning in Early Childhood. Educating the Young Child, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44297-6_12
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