Helle Pia Laursen

Umbrellas and angels standing straight – a social semiotic perspective on multilingual children's literacy

In a Danish context, the acquisition of literacy by the ‘bilingual student’ is embedded in an education policy discourse in which literacy is seen as a cognitive competence that can be quantified by measuring a number of specific skills in a defined language and in a defined written language. On the basis of empirical data from the research project Signs of Language, in this article I will focus on how a social semiotic perspective on literacy can contribute to adding new dimensions to research in literacy acquisition by bilingual students. I will do this by focusing on how the interpretation and interaction processes of the child affect the childs meaning-making, and by focusing on the discursive macro-histories in which this meaning-making is embedded.

Timespacing competence: multilingual children's linguistic worlds

ABSTRACT Drawing on Kramschs conceptualization of the multilingual subject and the symbolic self, in this paper, we explore how multilingual children re-signify three intertwined myths about the bilingual student, linguistic diversity and language competence, when, in the researcher-generated activity My linguistic world 2014, they are invited to map and talk about their lived experiences as multiple language users seen in the light of place and movement. By demythifying themselves and their linguistic worlds, the children also raise important questions about the notion of linguistic competence. By perceiving competences from a subjective child perspective, we learn how children do what we call timespacing competence. On that basis, we suggest paying attention to how children themselves timespace competence by focusing (more consistently) on the subjective, social, spatial and temporal dimensions of (knowing) language.

Language competence in movement: a child's perspective

This article examines how, in a multilingual perspective, language competence is experienced, talked about and practiced by language users themselves. By viewing children as active co-creators of the spaces in which language is used, this article contributes to a research tradition in which focus is shifted from viewing the individuals language competence as a mental linguistic or communicative property, to viewing language as a series of social and spatial practices. Looking at data from the research project Tegn på Sprog (in the following referred to as Signs of Language), which examines multilingual childrens language and literacy acquisition processes, we direct our focus to a single childs active exploration of what it means to know a language. Through analysis of interviews and researcher generated activities, we see how this child both describes and does language competence as a phenomenon that has several meanings, is social, is dependent on location and is unpredictable. Thus, we demonstrate how focus on the childs perspective of what it means to ‘know language’ can lead to insights into the creative, complex and dynamic processes that are part of childrens active meaning making with regard to language.

Metalanguaging Matters: Multilingual Children Engaging With "The Meta"

Inthisarticle,theauthorsbuildonempiricaldatafromtheongoinglongitudinalresearchproject Signsoflanguage(2008–2018)toexaminehowmultilingualchildreninaprimaryschoolsettinguse metalinguisticresourceslinkedtoseveralwrittenlanguages.Groundedinsocialsemioticsanddrawing onnewersocialperspectivesonmetalanguage,theauthorsfocusonaresearcher-generatedactivity designedtoinvitethechildrentoreflectonlanguageandliteracy.Intwoparticularinteractions,they explorehowthechildren“engagewiththemeta”bynavigatingbetweendifferentlanguagesandsign systems,andhowtheiruseofmetalinguisticresourcesinareferentialsenseisinextricablylinkedtoa dialogicallyformedandperformativenegotiationofsocialidentityandsocialrelations.Thus,adopting ametalanguagingperspective,thisarticledemonstrateshowmetalinguisticstatementsaboutlanguage arecloselyinterwovenwithanongoingproductionandnegotiationofthecommunicativesituation. KEywoRDS Linguistic Diversity, Literacy, Meaning Making, Metalanguage, Multilingual Classroom, Reflexive Awareness, Signs of Language, Social Semiotics

Clarifications and carnival: Children’s embodied investments in a literacy conversation

Abstract Previous studies of clarification requests in conversations involving second language users typically view such requests as important to obtain ‘comprehensible input’ or as a form of repair resulting in a sidetrack from the ongoing conversation. This article argues that clarification requests potentially have a much deeper influence on the course of interaction. Using data from a classroom literacy activity, involving three 12 year olds jointly reconstructing a text, the analysis shows how the requests become points of departures for a collective exploration of the symbolic possibilities of sign, text, body and space, through which a Bakhtinian carnivalesque and grotesque universe emerge.