Making sense of comprehension practices and pedagogies in multimodal ways: A second-grade emergent bilingual's sensemaking during small-group reading

Abstract

Despite the rise in multiliteracies and multilingual orientations to literacy learning, there has been little attention to multimodality in how younger emergent bilinguals demonstrate and respond to reading comprehension practices and pedagogies. This study, which took place in the midwestern United States, examines how Marian (pseudonym), a second-grade emergent bilingual (eight years old) made sense of texts using a variety of semiotic resources. The study also focuses on how her use of such resources demonstrated her engagement with texts and reading comprehension pedagogies during small-group reading in her classroom. Findings show that Marian used a variety of semiotic resources to convey her understanding of texts, some of which aligned with and resisted typical reading comprehension pedagogies in classrooms. Additionally, analysis demonstrates that reading comprehension pedagogies may have inhibited her sensemaking. Implications include further attention to how teachers, policy-makers, and researchers can recognize and make space for the multimodal and dynamic ways in which emergent bilinguals make sense of texts.