Experiências com a produção de textos multimodais por crianças de 4 e 5 anos no espaço doméstico

Abstract

Children are multimodal social beings, and national and international research indicates that very young children participate in a wide range of daily digitally mediated communications and literacy practices. In this context, they produce different multimodal texts, establishing the communication as a multimodal event that assembles diverse semiotic ways and resources, regardless of the means used: oral or written, handwritten, printed, or digital. Considering this issue, the main objective of this research was to investigate elements that reverberate when 4 to 5-year-old children carry out school activities involving multimodal resources in their households. We have deepened the issue from the specific objective of understanding how children’s engagement takes place, the digital knowledge they use, the solutions they find, and the languages they choose. A secondary objective was to check how family members mediate these activities and how they perceive children’s performances. The investigation dialogued with studies on the relationships between children, technology, and families, children’s digital literacy, multimodality, children’s relationship with digital written culture, and official documents, among others. The research, conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, is a qualitative methodology organized around a reading book that proposed activities to the children involving the use of semiotic resources such as drawing, writing, video production, storytelling, creation of new characters, production of objects, etc., allowing children and their families to share and exchange ideas. We conducted semi-structured interviews with the children and families, and participant observation. The main results showed the ways children build their strategies to produce the activities, show their active and creative actions, and their protagonism in each creation: gestures, behaviors, intonations, verbal records, drawings, production of artifacts, etc. To many children, the ways families participated have contributed to raising resources, developing the activities, and stimulating them to develop the activities. Analyzing their appropriations has allowed us to know how they think, and how they build senses with different semiotic resources, indicating the need to listen carefully to their voices.