Browsing by Author "Renlund, Jenny"

This thesis examined the strategies in multiliteracy used by children in their interpretation of multimodal texts through peer dialogue. The thesis builds upon a sociocultural approach to meaning-making in interaction. According to new, broader perspectives on literacy, our so-cially and culturally shaped messages take ever more complex forms, which means that we also require mastery of complex literary skills in our meaning-making. This places new de-mands on pedagogical practices and on research to be considered. The development of multiliteracy skills in children is one of the objectives included in the Finnish national curricu-lum, which means that more knowledge of how multiliteracy can be enhanced in different contexts is needed. This study is influenced by theories within the research on multiliteracy as well as on previous research on emergent literacy among young children. The goal is to demonstrate emergent multiliterate processes of meaning-making expressed by young chil-dren in their interpretation of text through peer dialogue. The results may have an impact on the planning of pedagogical practices and materials used for the promotion of equal opportu-nities among children in the development of multiliteracy. The research was conducted with qualitative, unstructured, interviews in the form of text-dialogues. The participants were 40 children from a Finnish-speaking preschool. The children were 3 to 6 years old at the time. The text-dialogues that were filmed, showed the children working in pairs with the guidance of an adult interviewer, interpreting infographic posters. The dialogues were analysed with a qualitative thematic analysis and categories for the analysis were formed according to previous research on multiliteracy. The multimodality of the meaning-making expressed by the children was considered in the analysis, which gave a more nuanced picture of their processes. The results presented in the thesis suggest one way of relating emergent literary processes of young children with concepts of multiliteracy, as well as tools for closer examination of different forms of meaning making that young children express when interpreting multimodal and informative texts. The children in the study used complex multiliterate resources and strategies in their text-dialogues, which supports earlier theories of emergent readers as capable interpreters of varying text-sources. The meaning-making of the children was dynamic and transformative. The infographic posters used in the text-dialogues created a multiplicity of combinations of textual modalities, which enabled the children to assess the texts from many different perspectives.