Young children's play is highly multimodal, with gesture, gaze, movement and speech often combined simultaneously in collaborative meaning-making. This article argues for a multimodal social semiotic perspective on play, recognising that this requires representation of data that brings multimodal elements into careful consideration. In this…

This paper explores the implications of children's out-of-school digital multimodal composing practices on learning and teaching in the formal educational context. It adopts a case study approach where publicly accessible "YouTube" video productions of three children around the world are examined. Applying a multimodal discourse analysis…

This paper examines the implementation of the "Prevent Duty" to actively promote fundamental British values in English Further Education (FE). After critically reviewing the history of "Prevent" and the 2015 "Duty" to identify evidence of radicalisation in FE, data from interviews of strategic decision-makers in two…

Twitter has become a common feature of academic conferences, used by organizers to provide information about the conference and by attendees to engage in discussion about the conference topics, share information, and create social links and networks within the community. This study examines the tweets from two conferences in Applied Linguistics in…

Primary and secondary school teachers in the London area discuss their understanding and operationalising of the concept of ability as applied to their students. Combining elements of achievement and potential, 'ability' is not clearly and consistently defined by teachers and is, strictly speaking, not a necessary concept since other terms account…

This article looks at the ways in which the semiotics of authority are established and challenged during a secondary school English lesson on "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde". I focus on the utterances of one student and the context of the classroom in which she finds herself as a means to explore the ways in which pedagogic…

We need to keep experimenting with writing to meet the challenges of Deleuze and Guattari's flattened ontology in the humanities. The paper reports on a small, experimental research project at a university in the north-west of England. The findings are written in an experimental mode, inspired by the Deleuze and Guattarian concept, 'assemblage'.…

Marketing principles and consumerism are evident in higher education with universities central to the development of fit for purpose graduates. Students are increasingly viewed as consumers of university products and expected to manage self-hood and to promote themselves to the marketplace. This article is drawn from research in an ongoing larger…

The paper describes the transformational role technology plays in the management and transmission of heritage (minority) languages (HL) in two UK-based multilingual families. Data were collected in the form of a language background survey, parental interviews, and recordings of interactional events within the home. Findings suggest that parents…

At the heart of the nineteenth-century educational soundscape lies a paradox. Whilst "modern" classrooms generally strived for orderly silence, the goal of its educational practices was the production of competent "citizens". Middle-class boys in particular were expected to acquire a voice fit for business, the professions, or…

Digital technologies have material and social properties that have the potential to create new opportunities for children's expressive arts practices. The presence and development of oral narratives in young children's visual art-making on paper has been noted in previous research, but little is known about the narratives children create when they…

Digital technologies have the potential to offer new opportunities for children's expressive arts practices. Although adult expectations surround and shape children's visual art making on paper in the early years classroom, such expectations are not so established in relation to digital art making. So how do children make sense of digital art…

The aim of this study is to uncover the emergence of cultural mathematical understandings and communications in young children's spontaneous pretend play. It is based on Vygotskian cultural-historical perspectives and social-semiotic theory, informed by research into "funds of knowledge" and considers how children's informal knowledge of…

This article focuses on the theoretical-methodological question of how to identify reform-induced changes in school mathematics. The issue arose in our project The Evolution of the Discourse of School Mathematics (EDSM), in which we studied transformations in high-stakes examinations taken by students in England at the end of compulsory schooling.…

The view of language from a social semiotic perspective is clear. Language is one of many semiotic resources we employ in our communicative practices. That is to say that while language is at times dominant, it always operates within a multimodal frame and furthermore, at times modes other than language are dominant. The 2014 National Curriculum…