In this article, the concept of competence is studied from the point of view of the semiotics of education. It will be claimed that it is a central key concept when we are trying to analyse the meaning of education. Educational action can be reasonably understood as an insecure and complicatedly mediated trial to affect another person's…

The recent development of biosemiotics has revealed the achievement of knowledge and the development of science to be the results of the semiosis of all life forms, including those commonly regarded as cultural constructs. Education is thus a semiosic structure to which evolution itself has adapted, while learning is the semiotic phenomenon that…

Although people may readily refer to Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. as Anglophone countries, recent demographic and sociolinguistic profiles of these countries indicate that they are actually both Anglophone and multilingual, and in some of their cities, even more multilingual than Anglophone. Recent research also indicates…

Professionals working in international companies in Sweden are expected to speak, read, and write in Swedish and English in their daily work. This article discusses professional writing in different languages. Through the use of methods from linguistic ethnography, we aim to enrich the understanding of workplace literacy by studying writing and…

In this paper we discuss the role of transduction in the teaching and learning of science. We video-filmed pairs of upper-secondary physics students working with a laboratory task designed to encourage transduction (Bezemer & Kress, 2008). The students were simply instructed to use a hand-held electronic measurement device (IOLab) to find the…

This article reports consequences for student writing quality based on a long-term professional learning project. Project teachers, representing all school subjects in grades 3-7, were presented with a writing construct, 'Wheel of Writing', and norms of expectation for writing proficiency. Participating teachers used the writing construct and…

In this paper, we first sketch the joint action theory paradigm from a general viewpoint in sciences of culture. Then we specify this generic description by focusing on the joint action theory in didactics (JATD). We elaborate on three currently developed elements of the theory: the reticence-expression dialectics; the contract-milieu dialectics,…

This article investigates how linguistic landscapes (LLs) can foster critical thinking about linguistic power relations and tensions in multilingual areas by acting as stimuli to reflect on the ethnolinguistic vitality of languages in a given region. We examine the pedagogical use of LLs as resources for the implementation of plurilingual…

Grounded in the three-tiered transdisciplinary SLA framework of the Douglas Fir Group (2016), we explore how the concept of 'semiotic resources' may be integrated into CALL activity designs. Starting at the macro level, we discuss how language ideology may influence where to situate semiotic resources within initial design considerations. We next…

Based on a study of the digital literacy practices of immigrant Filipino students in Vancouver, this paper focuses on how learners with unequal access to resources engage with different tools to locate information and find opportunities for language learning online. Data was collected through interviews and observations of participants as they…

This study aims to explore a teacher educator's perceptions and practice of translanguaging in his education classrooms as a teacher of English as a medium of instruction (EMI). Adopting a qualitative case study approach, the research revealed that the teacher educator used three translanguaging strategies (i.e. integrating academic discourse with…

This paper investigates the author's classroom practice of implementing an interpretive perspective on intercultural language teaching and learning in two online intercultural workshops on the topic of face masks designed and delivered during the COVID-19 pandemic. It reflexively examines two critical incidents in classroom practice in terms of…

The critical project the authors propose overturns the assumptions of human centrality that have underpinned much educational thought and practice, questions the ways in which the "human" and "nonhuman" are defined, and opens up new forms of engagement with the material, corporeal, and affective world. The authors ask how…

This paper presents a critical examination of key concepts in the study of (signed and spoken) language and multimodality. It shows how shifts in conceptual understandings of language use, moving from bilingualism to multilingualism and (trans)languaging, have resulted in the revitalisation of the concept of language repertoires. We discuss key…

This article examines the visual construction of the myth of the Albanian national leader in history textbooks. By applying visual social semiotics, it explores the function and usefulness of this myth during the critical years of Albania's self-isolation from 1978 to 1990. Depicted in recurring episodes that were decisive for the existence of the…