Messing about with metaphor: multimodal aspects to children's creative meaning making

Children's classroom talk and the connections between talk and text are current concerns for teachers. A deeper understanding of what child communication entails can ensure greater pedagogic support for the processes involved in text production. This article reports on a research project using multimodal discourse analysis to investigate child-to-child interaction in class. This research sought to uncover what multimodal analysis can reveal about the collaborative and creative meaning making, which children employ in spontaneous classroom discourse. Creativity here is understood in terms of everyday creativity in language. Instantiations of video-recorded classroom communication between children have been closely analysed using a framework based on a functional view of interaction, specifically the work of the textual meta-function. Attention to cohesive devices of intertextual referencing, idiom and metaphor as well as repetition and reference through a multimodal lens has revealed the ways in which all modes work in an integrated ensemble to make meaning. Examples in this article of the ways in which children mess about with multimodal semiotic resources, employing them intertextually in metaphorical meaning making, have been taken from a Year 5 mixed primary geography lesson on the water cycle.