Play, imagination, and affordances: Supporting children’s agency in L1 and L2 learning through teacher-student role-reversal
Submitted by:
Alessandro Rosborough
Abstract:
From a Vygotskian (1987) theoretical perspective, language constitutes the primary mediational tool for teachers and learners to create semiosis, meaning, and sense of the world around them. Teachers and students must carefully listen and respond to one another in significant and meaningful ways, especially early first language and second language learners. While emergent first and second language (i.e., emergent bilinguals) learning differ, an important shared goal is to bring all participants together in a manner where collective thoughts and experiences create a shared sense of symmetry in their learning paths. In such a scenario, Vygotsky’s ZPD and embedded concept of play support the student-as-teacher and teacher-as-student role-reversal. This work presents and elaborates on emergent examples that demonstrate the benefits of play and imagination for language learning in young students. The coupling of language with multimodal affordances in the environment supports emergent L1 and bilingual children as they use one of their earliest forms of communication, gesture, with additional modalities (e.g., texts/technology) to create meaning and shared understanding not readily available through the verbal channel alone (McNeill, 1992). Moving away from a focus on L1 verbal input/output communicative patterns in lessons, the establishment of play and imagination as central to the learning and development process shifts lessons and teachers away from direct teach-to-the-test type answer patterns to playful and imagination-filled spaces where the child’s agency, meaning, and sense-making abilities come to the forefront. This research uses case study data from multiple prek-3 L1 and L2 acquisition contexts to analyze and describe how gesture and other modalities (drawing, photos, quilts, and so forth) support the role reversal of the teacher-student relationship. Findings demonstrate how interactive play and space for imagination, including acceptance of contingent answers (author, 2023), were extended through teacher-student role-reversal and benefited from multiple modalities, creating further affordances for the students to use. We conclude that such playful spaces created shared-intentionality and extended languaging (Swain & Watanabe, 2013) which developmentally benefit literacy learning for early L1 and L2 learners in ways not readily available through traditional L1 lesson plan teaching patterns and curriculum.
Key Words: play, imagination, agency, symmetry teaching
References
author. (2023)
Swain, M., & Watanabe, Y. (2013). Languaging: Collaborative dialogue as a source of second language learning. The encyclopedia of applied linguistics, 3218-3225.
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech. In R.W. Rieber & A.S. Carton (Eds.), The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky, Volume 1: Problems of general psychology (pp. 39–285). New York: Plenum Press.