The playful entanglements of very young children’s intergenerational video calls across cultures and languages: More-than-human perspectives

Abstract

The United Kingdom is home to a culturally and linguistically diverse population of young children living in families where digital technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to develop multiliteracies across languages. Many babies and toddlers born into multilingual families take part in online video calls, often on smart phones or tablets, to connect with distant family and to engage in culturally and linguistically diverse intergenerational play practices. Exploring the phenomenon of young children’s intergenerational video calls through the findings of the recent ESRC-funded Toddlers, Tech and Talk study, in this paper we consider the potential of digital media to support children’s emergent multilingual play and culturally rich multiliteracies learning. Despite an increase in research about young children’s digital lives, very few studies have considered the impact of this phenomenon on multilingual children aged under 3 years. Drawing on a sample of 40 co-conducted case studies with diverse families at home in the UK, we present novel insights into how intergenerational video calls enabled emergent multilingual children aged from birth to 36 months to forge and maintain affective bonds with distant loved ones and to learn about culturally significant stories and artefacts from their multilingual heritage. We adopt more-than-human perspectives to explore how affect, place, space, materiality and the sensory richness of children’s bodies were integral to how they built their multiliteracies and multilingual confidence. We suggest that thinking with more-than-human theory makes visible the nuances and complexity of online communication that characterise contemporary communicative practices.