Bringing ethnography to a multimodal investigation of early literacy in a digital age

In this article I reflect on the insights that the well-established traditions of ethnography can bring to the more recent analytic tools of multimodality in the investigation of early literacy practices. First, I consider the intersection between ethnography and multimodality, their compatibility and the tensions and ambivalences that arise from their potentially conflicting epsitemological framings. Drawing on ESRC-funded case studies of three and four-year-old children's experiences of literacy with printed and digital media, I then illustrate how an ethnographic toolkit that incorporates a social semiotic approach to multimodality can produce richly situated insights into the complexities of early literacy development in a digital age, and can inform socially and culturally sensitive theories of literacy as social practice