Semiotic resourcefulness: A young child's email exchange as design

Abstract

Children's resourcefulness can be seen in their ordinary, everyday `semiotic work' as they select resources from those ready to hand to create play environments and artefacts. Is this resourcefulness also evident as they make meaning in the highly conventionalized mode of writing? Conceptualizing writing as a process of design opens up the possibility for understanding meaning-making beyond the linguistic. In a spontaneously initiated email exchange with her uncle, a six-year-old child demonstrated semiotic resourcefulness as she made meaning in a variety of ways: by selecting and combining particular lexical and syntactic choices, but also in her deployment of other semiotic resources such as spacing, punctuation and spelling. The un-school-likeness of this young child's domestic literacy implies agency and initiative as she designed writing apt to the social context, and demonstrated her literate capacities in the here and now.