This article contributes to an emerging body of scholarship on multimodal composition in the poetry classroom through a study of Finnish lower secondary students' digital videomaking in response to poetry. The study explores students' use of semiotic resources in their interpretive work in transmediating a poem into a digital video, with a…

Scholarship on trajectories of becoming with literate activities is of growing interest in Writing Studies, particularly in accounts of writing grounded in cultural-historical and dialogic approaches, and in lifespan accounts of writing. The research reported here contributes to those conversations by tracing trajectories of becoming that are…

People communicate through language as well as visual embodied actions like gestures, yet audio remains the default recording technology in interview-based writing research. Given that texts and writing processes are understood to involve semiotic resources beyond language, interview talk should receive similar treatment. In this article, I…

In this study, we examine how youth use media production to represent, (de)legitimate, and reimagine their experiences of hypercriminalization--the pervasive complex of social practices such as racial profiling that position young men of color as "always-already criminal." We analyze two clips from a youth-produced news show called…

Communication using popular digital media involves understanding multimodal systems of appraisal for expressing attitude, which traditionally deals with emotions, ethics, and aesthetics in language. The formulation and teaching of multimodal grammars for attitudinal meanings in popular texts and culture is currently underresearched. This article…

Drawing on a text-based ethnography of digital writing in a biology laboratory, this article examines the text trajectory of a scientific manuscript and a scientific team's related writing for public audiences, including for citizen scientists. Using data drawn from texts, observations, interviews, and related artifacts, the author examines how…

Too frequently, representations of disciplinary writing foreground static notions of knowledge creation and literate practice in science and engineering. Rooted in discourse community theory, such representations present normative tropes of scientific practice that background notions of disciplinarity and obscure people's lived experience and…

Based on Vygotsky's theory of the interplay of the tool and sign functions of language, this study presents a textual analysis of a corpus of student-authored texts to illuminate aspects of development evidenced through the dialectical tension of tool and sign. Data were drawn from a series of reflective memos I authored during a seminar for new…

Resulting from stroke or brain injury, aphasia affects individuals' ability to produce and comprehend language, but it also creates profound social changes, limiting individuals' opportunities to communicate or to be seen as capable of communication. To address these challenges, the field of communicative sciences and disorders (CSD) has sought to…

Handwritten texts carry significant information, extending beyond the meaning of their words. Modern neurology, for example, benefits from the interpretation of the graphic features of writing and drawing for the diagnosis and monitoring of diseases and disorders. This article examines how handwriting analysis can be used, and has been used…

Under the rapid advances of digital technology, traditional paper-based forms of reading and writing are steadily giving way to digital-based literacies, in theory as well as in application. Drawing on a study of literacy in a medical workplace context, this article examines critically the shift toward computer-mediated textual practices. While a…

This study examined adolescents' perspectives on their multimodal composing goals and designs when creating digital projects in the context of an English Language Arts class. Sociocultural and social semiotics theoretical frameworks were integrated to understand six 12th grade students' viewpoints when composing three multimodal products--a…

This article examines multimodal texts created by a cohort of academically marginalized secondary school students in Singapore as part of a language arts unit on persuasive composition. Using an interpretivist qualitative approach, we examine students' multimodal designs to highlight opportunities taken up for expanding literacy practices…

As the scope of rhetorical inquiry broadens to cover intersemiotic and intertextual phenomena, scholars are increasingly in need of new, defensible analytic procedures. Several scholars have suggested that methods of discourse analysis could enhance rhetorical criticism. Here, I introduce a discourse-based method that is empirical, delicate, and…

This study examines the composing process and authorial agency of a college ESL writer as she remediated an argumentative essay into a multimodal digital video. Employing principles of sociosemiotic ethnography, and drawing on the concepts of resemiotization and recontextualization, the study investigated multiple types of data, including an…