A Case Study of How a Kindergarten Teacher Incorporates Multiple Semiotic Systems in Her Classroom Instruction

[[abstract]]Although several studies have shown that children use diverse ways to communicate, and many scholars have stated that early childhood education must include multiple routes to literacy, there is a lack of research studying how teachers and children use different modes (e.g., visual, gestural, sound) and media (e.g., book, screen, radio) to teach and learn in early childhood classroom settings. This qualitative case study investigated how a kindergarten teacher utilized multiple semiotic systems in the teaching and learning process. It took place in a kindergarten classroom where the teacher incorporated multiple semiotic systems (visual, auditory, gestural, spatial, linguistic, and multimodal) in her classroom instruction and valued her students’ multiliteracies performance. Analysis of the data revealed that to incorporate multiple semiotic systems in her classroom instruction, the teacher utilized multiple semiotic systems in every lesson, provided step-by-step demonstration, and experienced the meaning-making potentials of different semiotic systems with her students. This study supplemented the current research on the use of multiple semiotic systems in early childhood classroom settings. It also extended the existing studies by presenting the pedagogy of teachers exploring multiple semiotic systems with children