This article uses a sociomaterial perspective to explore how deficit views of young children’s language and literacy are sustained and can be challenged. Foregrounding the notion of multiplicity, it considers how diverse sociomaterial relations work to uphold particular kinds of practice and particular arrangements of bodies and things over others. These relations may interfere with and interface with each other in different ways, sometimes sustaining but also potentially disrupting deficit discourses and practices. Our sociomaterial perspective is illustrated with a short vignette from a study of children and touchscreen tablets in an early years setting. An initial analysis is followed by a series of alternate and tentative tracings of other kinds of relations that play through those moments. The article contributes to debates about social inequality by troubling the certainties generated though deficit models of children’s literacy, whilst working proactively to envision and produce alternate possibilities that foreground the potentialities generated as people and other materials assemble together.

中文翻译：

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缩小差距？克服早期识字社会物质描述的局限性

本文使用社会物质的视角来探讨如何维持并挑战幼儿语言和读写能力的缺陷观点。以多样性的概念为前提，它考虑了不同的社会物质关系如何支持特定种类的实践以及身体和事物的特定安排。这些关系可能以不同的方式相互干扰和相互作用，有时会维持但也可能会破坏赤字话语和实践。我们的社会物质视角通过对早年环境中的儿童和触摸屏平板电脑的研究的一个简短小插图来说明。最初的分析之后是一系列交替和试探性地追踪那些时刻发生的其他类型的关系。