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Susan Jane Britsch
The multimodal mediation of power in the discourses of preschool story designers
Keywords: discourse analysis, visual analysis, multimodal communication, early childhood, early literacy development
The analyses offered in this paper attempt to elucidate some of the complex strategies that very young children use to assert power in socio-narrative activity. The paper focuses on three child storytellers in one preschool classroom who recruited verbal, visual, gestural, actional, and narrative mediating elements to carry out multimodal discourses. The children’s spontaneous narratives made use of various combinations of color, size and placement of drawings, as well as segmental and suprasegmental language features, written language, gesture, and silence. These elements carried out each narrator’s moment-to-moment design of the discourse by working in service of a switch-off between signs via the various narrative elements of the fictions that the children were creating. Simultaneously, the children played out real-world social relationships through these fictional narratives in successive attempts to invade?or at least touch?corners of each other’s realities. The analysis includes a textual component as well as visual representations that relate the exemplified interactions to the discourses of which they are part. These interactions and discourses are also linked with the notion of macro-narrative and the role of less visible mediating elements drawn from the history of the child’s relationships.
Text - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 0165-4888
Volume: 25, 05/2005
Pages: 305 - 340