Peer ecologies for learning how to read: Exhibiting reading, orchestrating participation, and learning over time in bilingual Mexican-American preschoolers' play enactments of reading to a peer

This study investigates how a friendship dyad of preschool children enrolled in a bilingual Spanish-English Head Start preschool in California, predominantly serving Mexican-American families, enact and orchestrate in play the activity of reading aloud to a peer. It examines how the child leading the reading uses embodied and multimodal resources to exhibit themselves as reading, including using environmental couplings of talk and gesture (C. Goodwin, 2013) and how the peer being read to uses embodied resources to exhibit that they are attending to the reading (Erickson, 2004, Hindmarsh et al., 2011). It also tracks transformations of the children's publicly visible and embodied knowledge states (C. Goodwin, 1981) across time, specifically, across two episodes of reading spaced several months apart, to illustrate how a “trajectory of knowing-in-interaction,” or learning, (Melander, 2012), can be made visible. The examples contribute to a deeper understanding of the diverse ways in which children use verbal resources, their bodies and the material environment to accomplish the doing of reading as a public, shared, and mutually accountable activity. The examples also contribute to a deeper understanding of how children learn to act in culturally appropriate ways over time in shared reading activities, including how they “recalibrate” (M.H. Goodwin & Cekaite, 2013) reading action when expected embodied participation frameworks for doing reading are not exhibited from other participants.