This paper is concerned with fair and valid testing. It reports on a long-term project aimed at creating visual accessibility resources in mathematics computer-administered test items in a large-scale assessment system. We discuss our experience designing and developing pop-up illustration glossaries (IGs) for second language learners (SLLs) --…

This work analyzes a Grade 9 English Language Arts classroom discussion for moments of resistance and asks, What does student resistance accomplish when viewed as racial wisdom? Drawing from "posts" traditions, we analyzed the discussion's intra-actions or entanglements in order to more clearly understand how students draw from their…

Many pre-service mathematics teachers in South Africa are apprehensive about the content of Euclidean geometry, because they did not study Euclidean geometry in high school but will be expected to teach the content when they start their teaching career. This article reports on a study that explored the role of semiotic representations in…

The Linnaeus University project "The Book Dog and Astrid Lindgren" seeks to bring children and literature together and to use the dog as a tool for this. The method involves children reading aloud to trained dogs, called "book dogs." By studying the practice of the book dog, we seek more profound knowledge of the importance of…

A key insight of a transdisciplinary perspective on second language acquisition (SLA) as articulated by the Douglas Fir Group (2016) is its usage-based understanding of language. Evidence on the fundamental role that usage plays in shaping individual language knowledge is no doubt compelling. However, while the force of social interaction in…

The texts students encounter are becoming increasingly complex and multimodal. There remains a need to understand the semiotic resources students draw upon to make meaning with these multimodal texts. This study draws on social semiotics as a frame to explore the ways in which eight first graders with a wide range of literacy proficiency levels…

This article describes a visit to the exhibition "CSÁTH The Death of the Magician" at the Petofi Literary Museum in Budapest in the context of a university course for pre-service teachers of English. The course itself focused on multimodal social semiotics and visual arts to equip students with confident knowledge and skills to use with…

The present study investigates the adoption of Japanese by users from a popular Chinese video-sharing website, bilibili.com. Over a two-month period, 5,808 instances of language use that involve Japanese language features were sampled from 28,579 video comments. It was found that features of Japanese were often utilized -- either entirely in…

When learning a second spoken language, cognates, words overlapping in form and meaning with one's native language, help breaking into the language one wishes to acquire. But what happens when the to-be-acquired second language is a sign language? We tested whether hearing nonsigners rely on their gestural repertoire at first exposure to a sign…

Integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is becoming increasingly common in K-12 classrooms, and small group activities are ubiquitous to STEM instruction. This article includes both theoretical and practical descriptions of a microethnographic approach to critical multimodal discourse analysis that we used to…

This study discusses the dialect stylization and language ideologies involved in a nationally broadcasted radio prank show, "Carmen Calls." This national prank show permits a discussion on the language practices and hegemonic ideologies involved in the media representation of the show's Latina protagonist; "Carmen Santiago De la…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which early adolescent programmers embed meaning in their digital media created within an online programming community called Scratch. Design/methodology/approach: The author completed an 18-month descriptive case study with 5 early adolescent participants. The research design included a…

An extensive number of studies acknowledge the transformed nature of literacies by building on the complexity of multimodal semiotic repertoires and available digital resources (Reinhardt & Thorne, 2019; Toffoli, 2020). The exposure to such resources and tools makes digital literacies dynamic as environments provide students with opportunities…

This paper reports on combining semiotic and discursive approaches to reification in classroom interactions. It focuses on the discursive characteristics and semiotic processes involved in the teaching and learning of square roots in a ninth grade classroom in Japan. The purpose of this study is to characterize the development of mathematical…

Adopting an online ethnographic approach, we examine the linguistic/semiotic practices and ideologies of "purism" among Tatar and Iranian Azerbaijani Facebook users. We argue that purification practices can be understood as identity work, the outcome of which is often not an etymologically "purer" language but a (perceived)…