In this brief forum article, I draw from the disciplinary orientation of linguistic anthropology to discuss how a collection of linguistic and semiotic resources gets "enregistered" as the "language" for specific communicative activities. Enregisterment is an ongoing social and ideological process whereby a semiotic corpus gets…

Internet memes--usually taking the form of an image, GIF, or video with text--have become an important type of semiotic tool for meaning making. Due to the fact that memes can help learners leverage semiotic modes in social contexts, they hold great potential for language education. Integrating ecological social semiotic frameworks, this…

There has been an increased interest in multimodality in the field of both language pedagogy and translation studies. To our knowledge, however, only a few empirical studies have investigated students' perceptions and learning through translation classrooms focusing on multimodality. This paper reports on multimodal translation tasks implemented…

Much research on part-time Jewish educational programs has focused on curricular content and pedagogy. Yet classrooms involve diverse exchanges about curricular subjects as well as those that appear little related to Jewish studies; both are motivated by assumptions about which things count as Jewish matters of concern and appropriate orientations…

During a 10-week classroom-based study in a school in western Canada, 17 Kindergarten children had multiple opportunities to learn about how elements of visual art, design and layout in picturebook artwork are fundamental to meaning-making when transacting with this format of literature. Student application of learning about the concepts under…

Research has shown that arts-based approaches facilitate literacy learning in children; however, few studies have focused on the integration of art and early writing in community-based Chinese heritage language classes, which have been marginalized from the formal educational discourse in the United States. By drawing on the theoretical…

Despite the widespread use of mobile digital devices such as iPads in teaching and learning, there is little research on the ways in which content teachers make use of the technological affordances of the iPad to achieve pedagogical goals in bilingual/multilingual classrooms. This article adopts translanguaging as an analytical perspective to…

Studies examining culture representation in language textbooks have rarely adopted the semiotic approach, despite its potential for presenting and (re)creating cultural meanings at their various levels (i.e. cultural, intercultural, multicultural, and transcultural) in the co-instantiations of texts, tasks, and images. To address this issue, a…

Informed by a postmodern perspective on language, culture and visual art education this article examines what a creative, visual art focus can bring to the experience of language-and-culture learning for secondary-age students of Arabic as a heritage language (HL). It builds on our previous research focussing on student interactions with works by…

The aim of this study was to test the notion of ecological citizenship empirically in the English language classroom in an underrepresented region, Latin America. A pedagogic project aimed at the development of students as ecological citizens was designed and implemented in 2019 in four English language classrooms in a public secondary school in…

In response to becoming a more multicultural society, the South Korean Ministry of Education has implemented a multicultural education policy since 2006 by promoting English as key for young learners' communicative competence in a global world. Despite numerous previous studies on government-led curriculum and textbooks for English as a foreign…

Translanguaging and codeswitching are frequently employed in second/foreign language classrooms. Though the differences between these two practices have been examined from a conceptual perspective, the potential of translanguaging as a pedagogical resource has not been empirically addressed. This article opens with a concise comparison of…

Research on mode in computer-mediated communication and language learning has primarily focused on mode-as-channel of communication such as audio- or videoconferencing. However, increasingly sophisticated technological tools now facilitate communication in multiple ways so that learners can convey and respond to peers and screen-based resources,…

Drawing on interviews with staff from Language Supplementary Schools (LSS) in Manchester (UK), we discuss the emergence of makeshift ideologies whereby actors seek to legitimise choices and policies of heritage language transmission in the diaspora setting. Actors discuss the use of regional and vernacular varieties, the consideration given to…

Looking at human communication from the perspective of semiotics extends our view beyond verbal language to consider other sign systems and meaning-making resources. Those include gestures, body language, images, and sounds. From this perspective, the communicative process expands from individual mental processes of verbalizing to include features…