“¡Qué palabra tan difícil!”: los recursos docentes para la enseñanza de vocabulario durante la lectura de cuentos

The current study aims to analyze, from a multimodal framework perspective, the strategies that teachers use to scaffold early vocabulary comprehension during book reading to three-year old children. From this perspective, we assume that vocabulary learning develops within conversational exchange frames, where infants rely both on linguistic information and on elements of the situational and non-verbal context, as well as on social support. Data corpus consists of two videotaped story-reading sequences in a kindergarten of CABA  -twenty minutes per session- , which children from nearby urban-marginalized populations attend to (corpus:  Rosemberg , Stein &  Migdalek , 2003-2008). The intensive analysis made in a heuristic way used a categorization provided by  Menti  &  Rosemberg  (2009). Such categorization for vocabulary learning in elementary school describes the teachers’ move ments that focus on vocabulary - repai r, correction and amplification- . For video processing and codification, we used ELAN ii  ( Sloetjes  and Wittenburg, 2008) software. The exchange sequences analysis showed tha t, besides linguistic elements - words, definitions, comparisons - , teachers draw upon a v ariety of multimodal resources - gestures, body movements and dramatizations -  to amplify the vocabulary learning opportunities during the reading of short stories.