Multimodal strategies for engaging young Arrernte and Warlpiri children in storytelling and play

From an early age children learn to recognize and make use of the semiotic resources present in their immediate communicative environments. For children in Aboriginal families in Central Australia, these resources encompass everyday speech, sign language, gesture, and the symbolic conventions found in narrative practices such as sand drawing. Successful face-to-face interaction rarely involves only one of these ways of communicating with others–multimodality is the norm. There has been little exploration of multimodality in Aboriginal Australia in the context of children’s interactions with others. This study explores multimodal strategies used to gain and sustain attention, deployed by Arrernte and Warlpiri adults and children. We examine engagement between adult caregivers and young children in a task centred around storytelling from a picture-book prompt and free-play activities with toys. We show how engagement is attained and sustained multimodally through combinations of speech and action. Adult participants used the task stimuli as a springboard to highlight and reinforce familiar aspects of the lifeworlds of the children–for example, the centrality of kin relationships. In the research task children reciprocate and respond in different ways–they imitate the embodied actions of the adults, repeat spoken utterances, and make requests for on-going participation.