Estudio de caso de narrativas infantiles en videollamadas: Aportes al análisis de interacciones mediadas por tecnología

Abstract

The preventive and compulsory social isolation established in Argentina due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic led families to look for alternatives to maintain the bond and communicate with their non-cohabitant relatives. One of these alternatives was the use of videochat. Videochat enables new ways of audiovisual communication (Ames et al., 2010; Ballagas et al., 2009; McClure & Barr, 2017) that could affect the interactions in which adults and children collaborate in the construction of different types of discourses. Narratives are one of the first and most relevant forms of discourse, it allows for the reconstruction and communication of one’s experience and is one of the ways in which thought is configured. In this work, a case study was conducted of the narratives produced during videochat conversations of a four-year-old girl with non-cohabiting relatives. The aim was to characterize the interactions that help in the configuration of children’s narratives during technology-mediated situations. The research question were: (a) how do technology-mediated interactions allow the child to narrate about past and future events and to create fictional narratives?; (b) how does the child participate in the construction of those narrative in the context of these technology-mediated situations? Five videos of videochat interaction belonging to a single four year old girl were selected from the corpus “Contextos naturales de interacción en los hogares en los que los/as niños/as usan tempranamente tecnología”. This corpus gathers different technology-mediated interactions collected during daily activities in the home of children aged 0 to 6 years. First, 31 narratives in which the girl participated were identified. Subsequently, used the constant comparative method was used (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) as well as analysis tools developed within the framework of interactive sociolinguistics (Gumperz, 1982, 1984); also, concepts developed in previous research (Arrúe et al., 2014; Labov, 1972; Rosemberg et al., 2010; Stein et al., 2020) were heuristically recovered to answer the research questions. Of the 31 narratives produced in the interactions, 14 were related to personal experience, 13 were of future events, and 4 were fiction narratives. Regarding the posed questions, results showed that children do in fact create personal, future and fictional narratives in technology-mediated interactions with adults. Technology also enables children to decide how much they want to participate in interactions: they can lead the narrative, or they can back off to a yes-or-no answer kind of participation. The child relies on the possibility to share visual information, beyond audio, to provide both events and context information. This interactive and multimodal aspect of videochats was also found to enable the girl to turn to present adults both to scaffold her narrative production and to resolve doubts about unknown words. Even though there are methodological limitations to this study, this first approach to narratives in technology-mediated interactions shows the richness that this type of interaction can have for the development of children’s language. https://doi.org/10.16888/interd.2022.39.3.2