Interaccions potencialment transformadores. La interacció entre preescolars en tasques autònomes i col·laboratives, d'anglès com a llengua estrangera, amb el suport d'ipads i beebots
- Autores: Nathaly González
- Directores de la Tesis: Melinda Dooly (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2020
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: William Sadler Randall (presid.), Anna Maria Czura (secret.), Kumpulainen Päivi Kristiina (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Educación por la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
- Resumen
The rapid advance of digital technology has transformed the concept of being literate to comprise multiple literacies; communication is increasingly multimodal and often interactive and digitally supported thereby requiring newly evolved communicative competences. This has resulted in demands that schools and policies include digital technologies and their literacies as well as the development of the commonly denominated ‘21st century skills’ in their curriculums. However, very young learners’ developmental stage and needs must be taken into account for such amendments to be appropriately and effectively included and implemented.
In this sense preschools articulate their practices in social interaction and in particular through play, as these are the foundations for very young learners’ development. This includes foreign language (FL) learning, which is the focus area of this study. The use of iPads and apps in preschool classrooms for literacy practices is being actively explored in research although the use of robots has been far less extensively explored and very limited in relation to literacy practices. Moreover, from a plurilingual approach, preschoolers must be recognized as strategic and creative users of a unique repertoire of semiotic resources and that their plurilingual competence is developed through social interaction. Collaboration among peers, in this sense, provides opportunities to negotiate and co-construct meaning by allowing preschoolers to share their knowledge with others and let others influence them. Thus, to acknowledge preschoolers’ agency is to recognize and value their capacity to co-construct their own learning including FL learning practices.
Accordingly, this research analyses preschoolers’ peer interaction in autonomous and collaborative English as a Foreign Language (EFL) tasks supported by iPads and Beebots. In such context, the study aims to unveil: the nature of preschoolers’ peer interaction: focusing on what happens in preschoolers’ peer interaction and how it happens by discerning emergent similarities and patterns, across the data set analyzed. Language exploration triggers: exploring what makes preschoolers’ talk and/or engage in discussions related to language by identifying the stimuli that initiate or generate language exploration. And potentially transformative language exploration engagement: focusing on the language features, aspects or actions explored by the preschoolers which are considered potential language learning experiences, given that by engaging with them there is a potential transformation 23 language-related episodes selected from a corpus of 14 hours of natural occurring interaction are analyzed. A fine-grained micro-analysis of modes in interactions is employed. The analysis is framed by a mixed-methods approach in which Social Semiotics Multimodality, Multimodal Conversation Analysis and Multimodal Ethnomethodology are intertwined respectively, focusing on preschoolers’ meaning-making, action sequentiality and the situatedness of the research. The findings make visible, and thus noticeably value and highlight the significance of preschoolers’ energetic movement, physical contact used in communication, spontaneous play and orientation to others (participation framework) in interaction. It also highlights disagreement, agreement, repetition, co-construction, self-task organization and task-completion orientation as common triggers for language exploration. The analysis indicates the close relationship between the task’s design, the learning objectives and the affordances of the digital technologies used during the task and the language-related features, aspects and actions explored by the preschoolers. The findings contribute to identify key aspects to design adequate and effective EFL technology-enhanced practices and to value preschoolers as agentic language learners.
