Pointing With a Pen: The Role of Gesture in Early Childhood Writing

Abstract

This study explored the connection between gesture and writing in early childhood. Participants were 139 children ages 2 years 6 months to 5 years 11 months attending two U.S. childcare centers serving low‐income, urban families. Qualitative methods were used to record adult–child writing interactions in classroom composing events and in a standard photo caption writing task. Analysis of children's photo captions showed that 55% of children ages 2 years 6 months to 3 years 5 months used at least one kind of inscribed gesture (e.g., boundary inscriptions, pointing lines). Use of inscribed gestures decreased for older preschoolers. The younger preschoolers also used inscribed gestures in classroom composing events but less frequently. Multimodal interaction analysis was used to microanalyze talk, gesture, body posture, proxemics, and graphic activity for a subsample of 28 children ages 2 years 6 months to 3 years 5 months as they wrote photo captions with adults. Results showed that empty‐handed and object gestures were important modes of communication for preschoolers and adults engaged in writing events. As children pointed to the page with a pen in hand, they inscribed their gestures on the page, creating graphic arrays that indicated the target of joint attention. Adults foregrounded and reframed the child's inscribed gestures as emergent forms of writing, offering timely responses that provided opportunities to learn social expectations for writing processes, messages, and purposes. Overall, inscribed gestures served as an initial form of meaningful participation in writing events for preschoolers. In line with Vygotsky, gesture provided a launching point for learning to write in early childhood.

Adult Supports for Preschool Writers During Learning Centers

“…Recent research conducted from this perspective (Rowe, 2019) has shown that children's emergent writing performances provide opportunities for adults to notice, examine, and reframe the child's unconventional marks as if they are symbolic representations of linguistic messages. Questions directed at children texts such as “What does that say?” or “Read that to me!” are not neutral requests for information, but instead frame the child's text as writing and position the child as a writer (Rowe, 2008b).…”

“…Micro-analyses of adult-child writing interactions identified two important contexts for adult writing supports (Rowe, 1989(Rowe, , 1994. First, when the researcher served as an audience for the children's composing, she engaged in extensive conversations about their work, foregrounding children's texts as the visual, gestural, and conversational targets of joint attention (Rowe, 2019). Adult supports also included some direct teaching that provided information or explanations of print processes in the context of the child's writing (Rowe, 2008b).…”

Motivate and Engage Our Youngest Writers

“…We distinguish the sort of writing we are referring to from the range of writing young children are asked to do. We envision multimodal composing (e.g., Harste et al, 1984; Rowe, 2019; Wohlwend, 2009), as Hudson's books demonstrate, that includes not just letters and words, but interweaving sign systems such as talk, drawing and bodily movement, all resources that early learners use to create meaning. Relatedly, since the physical products of young children's meaning making through writing are sometimes not yet representational, we consider children's presence, along with their narration and engagement of their bodies, as inseparable from what is on the paper and necessary to understand their compositions.…”

Scoping the field of literacy research: how might a range of research be valuable to primary teachers?

“…Two other studies explored aspects of coaching: Correnti et al (2021) evaluate the impact of online content-focused coaching on dialogic text discussions while Robertson et al (2020) draw on a meta-synthesis of studies of literacy coaching to identify obstacles to and enhancers of co-construction. Rowe (2019) emphasises that child/teacher interactions are multimodal through her analysis of the role of gesture when children are writing with adults.…”