Abstract
Previous studies have shown that children as young as 5 years of age are able to form a basic understanding of evolution after listening to a storybook about natural selection. This study offers a semiotic exploration of children’s meaning making during an interactive read aloud of the same storybook by investigating what children focus on and negotiate during the read aloud. Video data from eight interactive read aloud sessions (N = 24 children) were analysed using a multimodal approach and contrasted with seven biological concepts intentionally described in the storybook. During the interactive reading, the children focused on all biological concepts at some point. However, apart from the biological concepts, the children also paid attention to other topics during the read aloud. These topics comprised Death, Change in behaviour, Realism, Babies, Milli bugs, and Aesthetics. Throughout the read aloud, a child-centric view of life influenced how the children made meaning about evolution. The findings highlight that through interactive reading, instructional storybooks also become a tool for discussing other aspects that children find important. Overall, the findings contribute with knowledge about the role of interactive read aloud as a pedagogical tool for introducing evolution in early childhood education.
Highlights
Read aloud of storybooks can be more or less scripted
Previous work (Emmons et al 2017; Emmons et al 2016; Kelemen et al 2014) has shown that children as young as 5 years of age are able to form a basic understanding of evolution after listening to the storybook How the piloses evolved skinny noses (Kelemen and The Child Cognition Lab 2017)
In building on previous findings by Frejd showing the role of interaction (2019) and semiotic resources (2018) in meaning making about evolution, this paper extends existing research by offering a semiotic exploration preschool children’s meaning making during an interactive read aloud
Summary
Read aloud of storybooks can be more or less scripted. In the Swedish preschool system, read aloud is far from a one-way communication scenario (Cekaite and Björk-Willén 2018). Read aloud can be described as dialogic or interactive. Interactive reading (Oyler 1996) is characterised by a high level of participation and children are viewed as participants and coconstructers of the read aloud where the reader “genuinely shares, not abandons, authority with the children” This suggests that children’s spontaneous questions or queries are embraced in the reading activity
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