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Young children's play is highly multimodal, with gesture, gaze, movement and speech often combined simultaneously in collaborative meaning-making. This article argues for a multimodal social semiotic perspective on play, recognising that this requires representation of data that brings multimodal elements into careful consideration. In this article, multimodal transcription is used to examine a video recording of three and four-year-old children playing a chasing game in an English nursery school. Map-like transcripts, including an animated transcript, are used to document an instance of their play, drawing particular attention to placement in space over time. Whilst such moments of play may at first appear fleeting and chaotic, multimodal transcription reveals the communicative, creative and agentive capacities of young children in a multitude of forms. The transcripts highlight and make evident the ways in which roles and rules of play are carefully negotiated moment-by-moment in multiple modes. In this way, map-like multimodal transcripts are presented as devices to highlight meaning-making where it may not normally be looked for, seen or recognised.

The aim of this paper is to critically review how social semiotics has contributed to the study of reading and to develop an agenda for further research. We consider the theoretical and methodological resources that social semiotics has developed to account for multimodal text in the contemporary semiotic landscape, and explore how they can be used to teach critical reading skills to young people to support their participation in different social domains. We reflect on the possibilities and limitations of different analytical frameworks, highlighting barriers and possibilities for advancing social semiotic scholarship on reading and beyond. We end with a sketch of a new research agenda for social semiotics, in the light of technological change and its implications for reading.

This article takes as its starting point a recognition of play as meaning-making, and the playground as a rich and dynamic 'meaning-makerspace' where children draw moment-to-moment, rapidly and readily on the multiple resources available to them to make signs of their interest evident. These resources are drawn from their own lifeworlds, folkloric and site-specific imagination, transmitted game forms from the past, and their pleasure and affective response to contemporary media. The playground is, therefore, a dynamic site for making and re-making, reflecting the concept of 'makerspace as mindset', where creative, collaborative meaning-making occurs ceaselessly in a range of modes. To illustrate this position, we share findings from 'Playing the Archive', an 'Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council' funded project exploring archives, spaces and technologies of play. Building upon the Iona and Peter Opie Archive of play from the 1950s-1960s, the project involved ethnographic research in two contemporary London primary school playgrounds, working with children aged 7-11 as co-researchers. A range of multimodal methods were used with the children to gain insights into their play, including iPads as filmmaking devices, chest-mounted GoPro cameras, voice recorders, drawings and mapping of playspaces. The research highlights that contemporary play exists not only in physical playgrounds, but increasingly in globalised 'virtual playgrounds' such as video games and social media. While these playworlds may at first appear separate, we identified ways in which virtual play intersects and inflects activity in the physical playground. We argue that play should therefore be seen as a series of 'laminates' drawing variously on media culture, folklore and the children's everyday lived experiences, re-mixed and re-mediated inventively in the playground.

This article focuses on children's play during the pandemic and how some young people responded with hybrid, playful media-making. The Play Observatory was an ESRC-funded project led by UCL and the University of Sheffield, inviting children to make contributions to a national collection of stories, texts and artefacts linked with their play during lockdown. The cultural material generated by children is an important post-pandemic legacy that allows us to argue for informal film-making as a legitimate literacy practice. Insights gained from children's creative film and animation work inspire new approaches to learning with media described as transludic, in which the characteristics of playful and improvised media production processes are given time and space to unfold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen a growing shift in Early Childhood Education from paper-based observation and documentation practices to digital documentation systems such as 'e-portfolios' and 'online learning journeys'. Here, we bring a multimodal lens to these new practices and consider the potential of digital documentation for democratic assessment practices that recognise and value all children's learning, particularly children who are living with disadvantage or in the early stages of learning English. Reporting on participatory ethnographic case studies of three diverse multicultural early years settings in London, we illustrate how digital documentation opens new possibilities for capturing the dynamic and embodied vibrancy of young children's learning and can make children's documentation more accessible to children and their parents. However, many digital documentation systems are currently designed primarily for adults, rather than for children to access and contribute to their own documentation. We suggest that adult-oriented design risks marginalising the child's voice as documentation moves from paper-based to digital formats. Our findings call for collaboration between researchers, educators and digital documentation systems designers to ensure that these relatively new tools support democratic and inclusive assessment practices, where all children's meaning-making, in whatever form, is recognised, celebrated and shared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video is an increasingly popular data collection tool for those undertaking social research, offering a temporal, sequential, fine-grained record which is durable, malleable and sharable. These characteristics make video a valuable resource for researching Early Years classrooms, particularly with regard to the study of children's interaction in multiple modes, which might include gaze, facial expression and movement in addition to language. Collecting video and carrying out multimodal analysis presents both possibilities and challenges, not least because multimodal methodologies are still in relative infancy. One particular challenge is developing forms of multimodal transcription. This paper seeks to reflexively explore the effect of applying different transcription conventions to the same section of video to investigate how two children interact at a computer in an Early Years classroom. It is suggested that the modes to which the researcher attends, and how these are (re)presented in transcripts, shape the analytical and rhetorical interpretations of children's interaction, with multimodal transcription potentially enabling particular insights into patterns within and between modes as they are orchestrated in interaction.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous impact on many aspects of children's day-to-day lives, including their play. Measures such as lockdowns, school and playground closures, quarantine, isolation and social distancing introduced to curb transmission have resulted in major consequences for where, when, how and with whom children can play. This article reports on interim findings from 'The Play Observatory', a 15-month project researching children's play experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Collecting data through an online survey and online case studies, the research offers insights into ways in which children's play has endured, adapted and responded to restrictions brought about by the pandemic. This article focuses on children's digital play throughout this period, including examples of digital gaming, online play, social media, playful creation of digital media texts and hybrid online-offline play. Drawing on theories relating to dynamic literacies, multimodal perspectives and the Reggio Emilia concept of the 'hundred languages', this article examines the role of the digital in children's contemporary play practices and the specific affordances of digital play during times of stress, uncertainty and physical distancing. The findings highlight ways in which digital play continued, adapted, evolved and reflected children's experiences and understandings of the pandemic. The study reveals the complexity of digital play and its place within contemporary digital childhoods, troubling simplistic notions of 'screen time' and highlighting the increasingly blurred boundaries around digital and non-digital practices, calling for educational approaches that value digital play as significant meaning-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's playworlds are a complex interweaving of modes, with the border areas between the digital and non-digital often becoming increasingly blurred. Growing in popularity and prevalence, multimodal technologies blending digital and non-digital elements present novel opportunities for designers of toys and play-spaces as well as being of interest to researchers of young children's contemporary play and learning. Opened in Denmark in September 2017, LEGO House defines itself as the 'Home of the Brick', a public attraction aiming to support play, creativity and learning through multiple interactive LEGO experiences spanning digital and non-digital forms. Offering a rich context for considering multimodal perspectives on contemporary play, this article reports on a range of multimodal technologies featured in LEGO House, including digital cameras, scanners, and interactive tables used in combination with traditional LEGO bricks. Three LEGO House experiences are considered from a multimodal social semiotic perspective, focusing on the affordances of multimodal technologies for play, and the process of transduction across modes, in order to explore the liminal border-areas where digital and non-digital play are increasingly mixed. This article proposes that LEGO House presents an innovative 'third space' that creates opportunities for playful interaction with multimodal technologies. LEGO House can be seen as part of a growing recognition of the power of play, both in its own right and in relation to learning, acknowledging that meaning-making happens in informal times and places that are not positioned as direct acts of teaching. Furthermore, it is suggested that multimodal technologies embedded into the play-space expand opportunities for learning in new ways, whilst highlighting that movement between digital and non-digital forms always entails both gains and losses: A matter which needs to be explored. Highlighting the opportunities for meaning-making in informal, play-based settings such as LEGO House therefore has the potential to recognise and give value to playful meaning-making with multimodal technologies which may otherwise be taken for granted or go unnoticed. In this way, experiences such as those found in LEGO House can contribute towards conceptualisations of learning which support children to develop the playfully creative skills and knowledge required for the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]