Re-appropriation of ideational meanings through drawings : A case of 5-year-old child experience in learning to mean

During the last decades, how children make meaning of particular worlds (e.g., events) through drawings has been well-documented. To add to this growing body of research, the present study attempts to document 5-year-old child experience in exploring ideational meanings represented in drawings as part of her home literacy practices in a transition into a dominant English school discourse in a multilingual context of the United States. Empirical data were garnered from the child’s drawings made at home, informal interviews with the child, and observation field notes focusing on the child’s think-aloud practices of drawing along with the features of the drawings in comparison with the captured movie images. These data were discursively analyzed using the concept of ideational meanings anchored in systemic functional and multimodal discourse approaches to capture the expansion of ideational meanings manifested in the child’s drawings. The semiotic analysis reveals that the child re-appropriated her drawings as a multi-semiotic resource to extend her understanding of the subject matter gained from the movie series. The ideational meanings were made subjectively through the interpretation of the drawings which have meaning potentials leading to the construction of meta-knowledge. The practical implication of this study is that language teachers may make use of drawings as a multisemiotic resource for scaffolding young learners in learning second and foreign languages (e.g., English).


INTRODUCTION
Much research on children literacy practices has examined how children make meanings as they engage in literacy and language practices in multi-semiotic resources in the context of first and second language learning and acquisition (see Feng & O'Halloran, 2012;Guijarro, 2011;Guijarro & Sanz, 2008;Hopperstad, 2008;Marsh, 2006;Mayer, 2007;Robert, Jurgen & Burchinal, 2005).This body of research indicates the significance of children's engagement in multi-semiotic resources which include digital and non-digital images regardless of learning first and second languages for developing children's conceptual knowledge.In such a learning environment, children have the potential to explore varied vocabulary words necessary to communicate, use their mother tongue, and learn a model of communication as they interact with others.Further, a myriad of interactions with multi-semiotic resources and thinking-aloud practices with peers or people around children help contribute to emotive, cultural, and cognitive meaning making (Feng & O'Halloran, 2012;Kyratzis & Johnson, 2017).Guijarro (2011) and Kyratzis and Johnson (2017) found that visual images are more important than words for Copyright © 2018, IJAL, e-ISSN: 2502-6747, p-ISSN:2301-9468 children in developing a meaning making competency because they serve as resources with abundant potential meanings to explore.Much of the previous research highlights that engaging children in varied literacy practices promotes individual language competencies.
Other studies also suggest that children's literacy practices are social practices shaping and being shaped by children's cognition and cultural behaviors (Dyson, 2001;Ivanic, 2001;Szwed, 2001).Such practices construct social meanings of literacy activities representing identities in terms of "the self" through reading and writing all available choices such as words or objects (Dyson, 2001) According to Dyson, if words or objects come with images or pictures or any signs that mediate meanings, the substantial meanings of the objects and words will be internalized as knowledge.As Dyson argues, Through their social actions, including their words, children establish their identities as knowledgeable people, socially included friends, and powerful actors; and, embedded in their actions is knowledge, not only about cultural texts, but also about the larger societyits ideologies (e.g., gender), institutions (e.g., sport, transportation, family, and not-all-together consistent values (e.g, belonging, competence, and winning) (p.326).
The socio-cultural backgrounds become critical of explaining how individuals make meanings from the signs they encounter since the appropriation of meanings could take place across contexts such as from unofficial to official contexts or from the official to unofficial contexts, each of which strengthens the material aspects of words or language commonly used.For example, children's participation in making meanings across contexts through multiple modes enables children to discover and invent different literacies in a literate society (Dyson, 2001;Goodman, 2001).Dyson and Goodman confirm that children can build the narrative of literacy from drawings from which they read, speak, and explore (see also Einarsdottir, Dockett, & Perry, 2009;Kendrick & McKay, 2002;Kukkonen & Chang-Kredl, 2018;Wawra, 2018).These studies confirm that when children of 4-6 years old learn English as a second language or a foreign language, the use of drawings in learning this language could help children construct meanings by controlling what to say from what has been drawn, sharing narratives, and popular cultural topics.Previous studies indicate the importance of including multi-semiotic resources in the content of school curricula in a way that relates to home multi-semiotic literacy practices (e.g., Davidson, 1996;Delpit, 2001;Dyson, 1997;Ivanic, 1998;Gee, 1999Gee, , 2001;;Street, 2001).
This present study attempts to add to the previous studies mentioned above investigating how children explore strategies of knowing and learning to mean through drawings in a transition to participate in a dominant discourse of an English-speaking community.The study focuses on how ideational meanings are made or construed from child's drawings and how the drawings were re-appropriated from a movie series.In this study, the transitional context and the movie series specifically characterize how a 5-year-old child explores ideational meanings in English from the drawings she made.

Ideational meaning: Drawings or images as a resource for making sense of different children worlds
The concept of meaning as internalized knowledge has been identified as a particular subject; that is, the subject about which people are talking (as in Guijarro & Sanz, 2008;Kress, 2012;O'Halloran, 1999;2008;Schleppegrell, 2012).The notion of a subject matter as internalized knowledge is related to ideational meaning in Halliday's (1973Halliday's ( , 1978Halliday's ( , 1994Halliday's ( , 2002) ) Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).That is, to talk about experiences is realized by the choice of participants as a topic or a subject, the choice of verbs as to make the connections between subjects and verbs, and the choice of adverbs as to make the interconnections of subjects and verbs more meaningful.The specific employment of the language choices in making meanings is the process of "determining the actual choices among the possibilities" (Halliday, 2009, p. 55).The choice of field serves to instantiate how a social context leads to explore meaning potentials to respond to an immediate context and to achieve the purpose of communication (Halliday, 1994).
When individuals engage in communicating an idea/event or experience, they make choices with regard to the context of situation.For example, when individuals are involved in the discourse of giving comments, such as, on the content of an advertisement, they may use different choices to achieve particular communicative purposes.In making the choice of field, they may express "your advertisement is misleading" or "you are a load of crooks" or "perhaps, it is not what you said" or some other possibilities as the subject matter.In the expression "your advertisement is misleading," the choice of "your advertisement" acts as a subject to realize a participant and "is misleading" acts as a verb to realize a relational process of making meanings.The choices indicate how individuals explore ideational meanings with reference to their knowledge.
Halliday's concept of ideational meanings shares semiotic approaches to understanding images with Kress and Van Leeuwen's (1996) reading images.In discussing a semiotic landscape, for example, Kress and van Leeuwen defines a semiotic landscape as "the range of forms or modes of public communication available in that society and their uses and valuations" (p.33).The landscape and lining provide resources to choose to make meanings.The decision to make the choices influenced by the context of culture and the context of situation in which meaning making takes place (Halliday, 1994).
In Kress and Van Leeuwen's concept of images, images have the sense of a landscape if provided with the following context.First, the image makes sense if seen from the perspective of a common environment, for example, the image of a school gains the sense of it due to its conventional buildings and its functions.Second, the use of a visual mode is not similar from one society to another, from one social group or institution to another.Third, each feature of a landscape has its history, and it is subject to constant change.As anchored in Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996), a grammar of language works in the same way as the images to represent patterns of experiences by constructing a mental picture of reality and making sense of experiences.In other words, the most prominently similar feature of Halliday's concept of language and Kress and Van Leeuwen's concept of images is the matter of choices of what to express.While language pertains to the choices of word classes and semantic structures, for instance, images deal with the choices of color and compositional structures (see also O'Halloran, 2008).Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996)

emphasize that
We see representation as a process in which the makers of signs, whether child or adult, seeks to make a representation of some object or entity, whether physical or semiotic, and in which their interest in the object, at the point of making the representation, is a complex one, arising out of the cultural, social and psychological history of the sign-maker, and focused by the specific context in which the sign is produced (p. 6).
What the sign maker has in mind is influenced by the convention of making meanings and the frequent contexts being encountered.Thus, drawings can mean that they represent the creator's identities and discourses, which are constructed socially and historically.

METHOD
Nested in a single case study design, this study documented in what ways a 5-year-old child explored ideational meanings through the creation of images and their connections with her knowledge about the world.It used an exploratory qualitative method to investigate children's way of meaning making as she engaged in free drawing activities while being interested in watching Spogebob Squarepants movie series.
The research design was adapted from Dyson and Genishi's (2005) qualitative case study examining how the participant, a single actor, made meanings of her own drawings.This study was guided by the following questions: (1) how meanings were made from the drawings and (2) how the drawings were reappropriated from a movie series.The participant of this case study was a 5-year-old child who was keen on watching Spongebob movie series.The child was in the first few months of staying and schooling in one of the college towns in the United States, experiencing a transition of being a bilingual speaker: English and Indonesian.She was born in Australia, but she had to live in Indonesia until the age of 5 before she lived in the US.At the age of 5, she had to be familiar with the English language in order to be able to participate in an English-speaking school community.The difficulty of using English to communicate with her peers and teacher led her to participate in another alternate literacy activity; that is, watching movies and drawing images.As a parent researcher, I had access and made a limitation of a two-month observation to understand the ideational meanings my child expanded through her drawings.She often showed an understanding of the story with a limited vocabulary of English, and yet created access to developing her English literacy through drawings from which this study sought to investigate.
The data of the study were garnered from observation field notes of the child's interactions with images and words when talking about the drawings as the basis for identifying logical and experiential meanings.The interview scripts were also collected from around 10 informal interviews, each of which lasted less than 30 minutes to clarify the meanings she made from the drawings.The questions in the interviews were, for example, related to the names of images, the meaning of the images, and more descriptions of the images.The collected data in the forms of drawings, observation field notes, and interview scripts were analyzed to investigate how she made meanings from the drawings.The data in the form of the drawings were analyzed to see their features in terms of their landscapes to reveal how the drawings were appropriated from the movie series, and the identified features of the drawings served as the basis for finding the captured images of the movies.Youtube was used to help find the similar captured images of the movies.All of her drawings were not analyzed, but selected on the assumption that those drawings had connections with the movie series.Of 40 drawings, 15 showed some features with the images in the movie.2018) provided an approach to investigating the re-contextualization of meanings from images.These examples and approaches were recontextualized in investigating the child images in this study.Thus, the field notes on the child's talk and thinking aloud practices of drawing were identified for further analysis on ideational meanings the child expanded.The analysis referred to Halliday's (1973Halliday's ( , 1994Halliday's ( , 2002Halliday's ( , 2009) ) systemic functional analysis to unpack the conception of ideational meanings by identifying topics as subject matters and verbs as attributes to the subject matters.Additionally, Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006)

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
The subject matter and context analysis was conducted to provide a description of knowledge that the child expanded through drawings.The internalized knowledge (Dyson, 2001) was regarded as the field in functional linguistic analysis, which in this study, addresses the subject matter and how the subject matter is attributed with verbs or process types.The drawings the child made indicate that the child captured the landscape and line of the movie images in her drawings.In general, the analysis of the drawings shows two main findings.First, the child constructed subject matters from her drawings, and they were expanded discursively, featuring her socio-historical experiences and meta-knowledge.Second, the child appropriated images from the movie series in terms of landscaping and lining, showing her position and subjectivities.More specifically, the child explored the ideational meanings through semiotic landscaping in her drawings in the following ways.

Exploring meta-knowledge through the contextualization of landscaping and lining
The field of the conversation arouse from her drawing activities.Since the beginning of her kindergarten, she had started drawing, coloring, and arranging pictures as well as contextualizing meanings she made from her favorite cartoon movie series into her worlds.In this case, while taking the landscape from her favorite movie images, she was attempting to make sense of her own perception and understanding of the appropriate space for the characters of the movie (see Drawing # 1 in Table 1).The landscape of the movies influenced the child's way of drawing and exploring meanings.As seen from her drawing as seen Drawing # 1, she explored the meanings of the field by activating her meta-knowledge."Happiness" and "riding a helicopter under the sea" are subject matters that she explored from the drawings.The concept of happiness is attributed with the words "it's like yaay."The child explored the subject matter from the expressions she made in the drawing drawn from the captured movie image in which it was represented in the form of hands showing happiness.The subject matter "riding a helicopter under the sea" was attributed by her comment in the form of a relational attribute to the subject matter, that is, "was crazy."This concept was made sense in a way that it is unlikely to ride a helicopter under the sea due to the environmental support.In what follows, the child mentioned that "it was not possible to start the engine and to fly under water." Those subject matters were drawn from the drawing analyzed in terms of landscaping and lining.First, the drawing resembles the images of the two bodies of the characters: Patrick the star and Plankton, forming a representation.The representation can be seen from the characters' posture favoring a two-eye character over one-eye character, representing a bad character in the movie.Referring to Goodman (2011), such drawings serve as a child's way of responding to a particular object.The child may have seen the object substantially in relation to its landscape of the movie in which the characters are represented, and yet often been conflicted with her expectation and her current state of mind.The drawing also represents that the child was a knowledgeable person who was able to determine what was possible or impossible, what was good or bad in representing an image (Dyson, 2001), In this study, the characters in the Spongebob movie series keep inspiring the child in terms of postures and surroundings.
Second, the shape of the airplane is the same as the one always shown in the movie.The typical picture also gained the image of a character in the movie (Patrick) as can be seen from the similarly typical parts of body.Similarly, a typical letter looks like an image of houses in the movie.The child's way of appropriating meanings may address what Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) found about the way in which the child picked up the similar landscape of such as lines, forms, and angles.In this case, the child captured meaningful images from the landscapes.For example, she captured the landscape of Spongebob Squarepants in a way that is more we can say about the child's perception than the right image of the character.She captured the character in a different position from the common landscape in the movie.The child used her meta-knowledge in the drawings about people in an airplane, influencing the positioning of objects in the drawings.

Contextualizing multiple discourses
The ideal landscape in the drawings represents a combination of her knowledge acquired from the movie and her personal experience such as reflected in the type of houses, windows, doors, roofs, all of which are not the features of housing in the Spongebob movie (see Drawing # 2 in Table 2).The styles of the houses and their environment reflect her experiences in the US in the form of random knowledge, yet contextually constructed.As seen from Drawing # 3 in Table 3, based on the interview with the child, the picture was described as a monster haunting Spongebob.In the image, the Monster was drawn as a giant character while Spongebob was made smaller than the Monster.She played the size in making meanings.The size of either big or small creature represents her capture of how the monster should look like and how it should be perceived.The child contextualized the concept of a house and its parts by attributing multiple discourses to the house as a subject matter.The subject matter was associated with the typical American styles and a character in the movie.The child also contextualized the concept of a monster as a subject matter by attributing it with the common big size of a monster and made the concept discursively shift into a small pet (snail) as a monster.The landscaping and lining analysis shows that the concept of the monster, if related to one of the characters in the Spongebob movie is similar to the shapes and lines of Gary the snail (a Spongebob's pet) transformed into her own perception of a monster.If it is connected with the character of a monster in the caption of the movie (right picture), the idea of a monster viewed from the perspective of lining and landscaping is not closer in shape to the monster character in the movie than to Gary the snail.The exploration of this knowledge confirms that the inclusion of her own perceptions and the influence of foregrounding images affect the child's substantial understanding of a subject matter.
The other example of landscaping in making meanings is reflected in presenting other worlds than the subject of the movie itself (see Drawing # 4 in Table 4).In this image, the child discursively conceptualized "neighborhood," "house," and "Nito" as the main subject matters.In this respect, the neighborhood was attributed by the image of Bikini Bottom and a high building, the house was attributed by the image of "N" letter, and Nito was created as another character created from other discourses.From the landscaping and lining analysis, it can be seen that the Spongebob image still affected the way the child presented an idea in the writing.One of the drawings looked like a big letter of an "n" which took a landscaping image from the Spongebob movie series.The landscaping of the movie series was transformed into another context.The similar features of her drawing can be seen from the line that shaped a form of houses in Bikini Bottom area of the Spongebob settings, while below the big letter in her drawing is a name /ni:to/---that how she pronounced it.Nito is another character that we can find in another animation movie.The similar image she drew underlines that there is an effort to connect from one captured setting to another.

Familiarizing the unfamiliar
In the drawings, the child posed familiarity with the objects, such as, the drawing -/wel/ (see Drawing # 3) indicating that she was trying to familiarize an unfamiliar object.She translated her thought in a symbolic way, then transformed her knowledge into an object.The image shows the child's strategy for developing a subject matter of unfamiliar knowledge into familiar one (Heath, 1983).The child's exploration of familiarizing the unfamiliar is also reflected in how she conceptualized the following colors with no explicit contexts: Green … yellow … black … one … two … three … four … five … all … ten … it's blue … it's green … look mom ….What color is that?She, then, uttered the words into /rek … mo … mow … nex … navita … where … no … no … She imitated someone as if she were speaking English.There was a group of phrases, some of which were sweet big … , were is …, look mom, this is strawberry, this is color black and white …., look color is green, and this is color black, I am baby … I love you baby … baby … baby ….At home, the child explored what could not be expressed in school contexts by speaking to herself of the language she just picked up.This random knowledge, however, shows the subject matters that she conceptualized by deploying certain attributes, for example, colors, rock, houses, herself, apples, and others with their attributes (see Table 5).
The inclusion of colors in the conversation (see Observation Rec 006) such as green, orange, pink, red is connected to her own repertoire on fruit, lollipop, fish, and rock.Fruit as a subject matter was attributed by unfamiliar colors, for example; strawberry was black and white.However, she made an effort to get more familiar with other subject matters.For example, "house needs sun," "sun not good for Spongebob" and "living has moon and sun."The child conceptualized a house, the sun, and the living as unfamiliar subject matters by drawing her understanding from the context of the movie whose setting was under water.She employed relational attributes by defining a house which needs the sun, and the living is attached to the presence of the sun and the moon.She, then, conceptualized that those attributes did not concur with Spongebob's house and living in which the sun light was a threat to the living under water.
The child's way of familiarizing the unfamiliar was evidently strengthened in other drawings.For example, as seen in Drawing # 5 in Figure 1, using her meta-knowledge to re-appropriate the concept with the landscape of the movie, she claimed the concept of the sun as a source of energy, representing an understanding of living with familiar surroundings such as a house, the sun, and trees.She said, "house where Spongebob cannot stay because there is sun."She said, "Spongebob happy if he stays in the house because moon and sun."The concept of pleasant living is constructed by the presence of the moon and the sun, making the unfamiliar familiarized with the characters of normal livings.She used her emotional appeals in trying to familiarize the unfamiliar.The subject matters the child explored were assumed to be drawn from multiple images that represent multiple discourses.The landscaping and lining analysis found the connection between the movie images and the child's drawings.
In the images in Table 6, the child also tried to familiarize some concepts through the visual forms that attracted her.According to Kress and Van leeuwen (1996), children chose the visual forms that best represent the interests they have in relation to what they draw.In this case, she was interested in conceptualizing the ideal version of a house, a subject matter for which she was not familiar.Therefore, she used her intertextual experiences in drawing and making its concept.Another example was the title /tjeri/ which was included in the drawing as internalized knowledge from other texts in creating the title for the Spongebob's house.Some features in Spongebob's house also constituted the transformation she created intertextually to familiarize the unfamiliar.
During two months of observation, the child was found appropriating images mostly and few words that she picked up from the movies into the dialogs with her parents and into drawings by incorporating her knowledge or other contexts.Despite few chances to explore the images in conversation, the child was involved in semiotic activities, in which language is part of it.As Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) note, semiotic activities involve: a sequence of production, transformation and development, moving from the relatively simple classificatory, cognitive, conceptual, semiotic and manual task of joining similar image categories, to that of producing complex and dissimilar images, and finding likeness in them (or imposing likeness on them) through an intermediary task of abstraction and generalization (p.36).

Movie captures
As also evidenced in the collection of her drawings, her semiotic activities involved a particular affective, emotional state which affected how the activity was read and transformed.In this case, the child responded to the movie's representational, semiotic, and cognitive resources.The child used different representational media, which are constantly productive and transformative to the child's subjectivity, and will potentially be productive in other literacy activities such as writing and having a conversation after staying for more than two months in the English-speaking community the child was engaged in.Although language is complementary in the child's acquisition process, and images serve as the central medium of information, language will be potentially developed as images carry the arguments that contribute to the making of rich expressions.Children's competence in drawing should be taken into consideration despite the case that some children may use talks and sounds to be more verbally than visually productive (Hopperstad, 2008).

CONCLUSION
The findings of this study show how the child discursively used drawings to facilitate interactions with other knowledge she encountered in her life.Regardless of some potential negative impacts of television viewing on learning and habits in life (e.g., Busse, 2017;Nikkelen, Vossen, & Valkenburg, 2015), the drawings alternately provide positive impacts on children's making of cognitive and cultural meanings because the drawings were mediated by the adults' guides.The adult guides could reduce the negative impacts of television viewing (van Vliet, Harrison, & Anderson, 2012).As mediated by the adults in controlling the television viewing time and making use of the ideas from watching to drawings, the child showed meaning making practices by incorporating multiple discourses and subject matters that helped her verbalize some intended meanings.For example, the child chose the images of the main characters as the source to appropriate any knowledge and language in her own modified contexts.She was able to make meanings through drawings as part of her visual literacy activities.
The study offers some implications for language and literacy instruction.One of the implications relates to the teaching English to young learners to involve the use of visual images to have children explore their knowledge around their world through multimodal learning.The multimodal modes of learning have a bearing on the children's attempt at imagining and using other available resources to make meanings (Cavus & Ibrahim, 2017;Chou, 2014;Guichon & McLornan, 2008;Mansourzadeh, 2014).Teaching language and literacy to children will be fulfilling if they are able to make meanings in many multi-semiotic modes such as in verbalizing the visualized narratives.Thus, the idea of postponing early foreign language learning (as in Zein, 2017) needs to be re-examined.Incorporating multi-modal semiotic resources into pedagogical practices may yield some significant impacts on young children's second and foreign language and literacy learning.

Observation
Rec 006 (Fourth week of February) Shanti : I think the rock now mm very love lollipop ….Rock now very ammmmmmh very like lollipop Daddy : Who loves lollipop?S : I love lollipop D : Me, too S : Me too S : Dad, mmmmmm apple and melon, strawberry and balloons, and I love lollipop Copyright © 2018, IJAL, e-ISSN: 2502-6747, p-ISSN:2301-9468 and baby and so ….. melon.s a red … and ….I did not ….Okay, no problem.I am walking on the rock and see fish.D : Where did you see the fish S : Indonesia …………….Flash?D : Do you like water?S : Yeah … Flash … Flash ….Flash.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Drawing # 5: The concept of the environment

Table 1 .
Drawing # 1: Landscape of the movies and the identified knowledge in drawings

The Child's Pictures Captions from the movie Subject matters Attributes
Happiness "It's like yaay" "riding a helicopter under the sea" "crazy"

Table 5 :
Familiarizing the unfamiliar concepts