Multimodal Interaction Analysis: a Powerful Tool for Examining Plurilingual Students’ Engagement in Science Practices

Abstract

Science teaching and learning are discursive practices, yet analysis of these practices has frequently been grounded in theorizations that place language at the forefront of interaction and meaning-making. Such language-centric analytic approaches risk overlooking key embodied, enacted aspects of students’ engagement in science practices. This manuscript presents a case of a plurilingual student’s participation in science inquiry to demonstrate how multimodal interaction analysis can be used to examine the highly diverse array of communicative resources that she draws upon while participating in science, including gestures, facial expressions, vocal intonations, and languages. Grounded in dialogic theorizations of language, we first detail the multimodal interaction approach, and second, we show how multimodal interaction analysis beginning first with her embodied engagement, then coupled with her subsequent written and spoken engagement, reveals robust views of her engagement in science practices. Key to this methodological approach is multilayered analysis that backgrounds verbal or spoken communication to allow for an identification of embodied interaction resources employed. We emphasize how this analytical method allows us to conceptualize science as a practice that unfolds through and in interaction, as compared to a static body of concepts to be learned.