Mapping meaning-making: A qualitative study of children's early literacy engagement in three crèches in Luxembourg

Literacy is generally understood as people’s ways of creating or interpreting meaningful signs, such as printed text or images. While the cognitive view on literacy focuses on literacy skills and abilities, the sociocultural approach addresses literacies as practices of individuals or communities (Kelly, 2010). A similar dichotomy exists regarding literacy in early childhood. In this case, emergent literacy describes young children’s reading and writing behaviours that precede so-called conventional literacy (Sulzby & Teale, 1996). Studies in this area, therefore, often aim to measure young children’s literacy skills and evaluate their school readiness.
In contrast, early literacy addresses young children’s literacy practices as part of a continuous learning process and values their various multimodal ways of engaging with print (Kress, 1997). This child-centred perspective highlights the social aspect of literacy and considers children as active co-constructers of meaning. It allows us to move beyond a focus on formal aspects of literacy learning, such as letter knowledge or phonological awareness, as it foregrounds sociocultural dimensions of literacy, like the function, the associated norms and values, or the personal meanings of books. Many studies have demonstrated the positive impact of children’s early engagement with books and other literacy tools on later language and literacy development (Hall, Larson, & Marsh, 2003; Neuman & Dickinson, 2001) and, consequently, academic success (Dickinson, Griffith, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2012). By contrast, qualitative studies on young children’s literacy practices and related meaning-making processes are rare (Worthington & van Oers, 2017). Hence, the need for more precise descriptions of early literacy engagement remains. While the term ‘meaning-making’ is frequently used in sociocultural research on early literacy, researchers fail to define it precisely. In this paper, I aim to account for this research gap by ‘mapping’ the meaning-making of young children in the context of their engagement with books. In line with researchers who have studied meaning-making in visual arts or science education (Fredriksen, 2011; Siry & Gorges, 2019), I suggest that meaning-making requires children to connect their past and present experiences meaningfully. Furthermore, making meaning in the context of early reading entails an engagement with the material, pragmatic and linguistic aspects of books.