Beyond words: Teachers’ conceptual negotiation of multimodality and early literacy in Swedish preschool class

This article investigates how teachers in Swedish preschool class conceptualize and make sense of multimodality in relation to children’s early literacy learning. While multimodal perspectives have become increasingly influential in literacy research, emphasizing that meaning is made through multiple semiotic modes, such as image, gesture, movement, and material manipulation, less is known about how teachers themselves understand and value these modes in classroom practice. Drawing on a qualitative interpretative research design, the study is based on semi-structured interviews with sixteen preschool-class teachers across seven schools in Sweden. The analysis, guided by a social semiotic and social constructivist framework, identifies four interrelated themes: (1) multimodality as familiar yet conceptually elusive, (2) multimodality in practice: rich enactments and epistemic tensions, (3) modalities as tools, supports, and values, and (4) navigating constraints and possibilities. Findings reveal that while teachers’ everyday practices are deeply multimodal, integrating drawing, song, movement and digital media, their understandings of literacy remain predominantly anchored in an alphabetic and linguistic norm. Multimodality is enacted intuitively but seldom theorized, often positioned as instrumental support for writing rather than as an epistemic mode of knowing and meaning-making in its own right. The article argues that this conceptual gap underscores the need for a shared professional metalanguage for discussing multimodal literacy pedagogy. By foregrounding teachers’ lived negotiations of multimodality, the article contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of multimodal communication in, and current trajectories of, early literacy education.