Educational semiotics in early childhood education: promoting language and literacy learning in diverse contexts

This chapter illustrates the value of adopting a social semiotic approach for understanding the potential of pedagogic practices in early childhood contexts to foster young children’s language and literacy learning. As a broader theory of multimodal meaning-making, inspired by Michael Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics, social semiotics provides highly suitable theoretical and methodological foundations for researching and developing practices that seek to build on young children’s capacity to communicate effectively across a range of contexts. This is due to core tenets of social semiotics aligning well with key Early Childhood Education (ECE) principles, especially the understanding that parents and educators play an important role in nurturing children’s language and literacy learning from birth, with a focus on meaning, and by using language and other resources such as movement, gestures and sound during spontaneous interactions and planned learning experiences. This chapter opens with an overview of key principles of ECE and perspectives on early literacy, which is followed by an exegesis of social semiotics as a foundation for understanding language and literacy development and practices in the early years. To support our assertions, we provide examples of literacy practices from ECE centres and storytime sessions in public libraries.