ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how the use of productive communication in an engineering club for children in the U.S. in grades 3–5 (ages 6–10) can facilitate opportunities for learning (OfL). These opportunities are particularly important for students who are learning English as an additional language (EAL) but also for girls and children of color who are underrepresented in the engineering fields. The authors explore how productive communication, which includes disciplinary literacy practices that are also multimodal and embodied practices of learning, intersects with OfL for young multilingual learners. The foregrounding aspects of dialogic encounters within the OfL model, this chapter includes images and descriptions of young learners engaging with engineering content while using rich communicative practices pertaining to disciplinary literacies. Findings demonstrate the importance of peer and teacher mediation in a situated community of practice to enable OfL. For multilingual students, particularly emerging bilingual students, multimodal meaning-making processes are particularly critical. In engineering, material manipulations and object-handling are two processes, in particular, that enable productive communication and afford multilingual students increased OfL.
