Designedly incomplete utterances as prompts for co-narration in home literacy events with young multilingual children

Abstract

This video-ethnographic study investigates how designedly incomplete utterances (DIUs) are used during home literacy events in three multilingual families with young children in Sweden to prompt collaborative storybook reading in the children's heritage language, Russian. The multimodal interaction analyses uncover how DIUs, in concert with other semiotic resources, create a sequential environment to prompt children's speech production in relation to the text at hand, negotiate language choice and alignment with an ongoing literacy project, and to creatively exploit the DIU structure to initiate storytelling. The findings moreover show that recurrent use of DIUs during the reading of well-known to the child texts with rhythm and rhyme allows for ritualized engagement in co-narration, in all contributing to children's socialization to oral performance in the heritage language.