'This exemplary book goes far beyond simple meanings and interpretations about language, to reconceptualise language as multimodal and embodied in spoken and signed words, created with machines and symbols, danced, painted … and always connected to place. The interdisciplinary authors are academics, pedagogues, located in communities and various practitioners who give us new insights into how children create their own language in their unique learning ecologies and share what this actually looks like in their lifeworlds.'- Nicola Yelland, Professor of Early Childhood Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia'If “it takes a village to raise a child,” this book powerfully shows that it is not only the people in the village, but the land, objects, and the whole host of non-human beings there who shape this development. The book demonstrates that language and cognition are embodied, shaped by an ecology of expansive social and material resources. How children draw from all the resources in their environment to think and talk in creative, spontaneous, and unorthodox ways suggests a complex language development. Judging their communication as deficient stems from our limited ideological assumptions. This book educates scholars to expand their perspectives by listening to the more-than-human communication “out of the mouth of babes and infants”!'- Suresh Canagarajah, Evan Pugh University Professor, Pennsylvania State University, USA'If you are interested in how, why and when children communicate, you will be informed, provoked, stimulated and engaged by this collection of papers. Rejecting simple and reductive approaches, the authors collectively show that children’s languaging practices are full-bodied, material, placed, unpredictable and delightfully opaque and slippery.'- Pat Thomson, Professor of Education, The University of Nottingham, UK
