Recent research has documented the ways that schools adapt to increasingly multilingual and multicultural student bodies. This qualitative study explores the schooling experiences of nine K-12 multilinguals not identified as English language learners in US schools. Using "deep interviewing" strategies, the authors expose the racializing…

Over the past decade, digital multimodal composing (DMMC) in the language learning context has received growing attention. DMMC entails teaching writing as the social practice of meaning making using various semiotic tools (Siegal, 2012). Despite its potential benefits as a way to teach a meaning-making process in the current digitalized era, much…

Training foreign language teachers for 21st century requires the consideration of digital skills as well as the change of focus from more structural foreign language instruction to more discourse oriented foreign language instruction. In this context, pre-service language teachers need to learn language teaching methodology and instructional…

This paper arises from research undertaken by educational semioticians and science educators investigating the use of student generated digital artefacts as assessment tasks in pre-service science teacher education. Part of a broader shift toward student-generated media in tertiary science, the use of such tasks is driven by the need to deepen…

Current literacy assessments are focused on a single mode of meaning-making (reading and writing, whether oral or written) and assume that literacy and language are 'fixed systems'-- comprised of discrete skills that can be taught and measured in isolation. This validation and privileging of a single mode of assessment are most culpable in…

Semiotics has been investigated in the literature to enhance second language vocabulary acquisition. The previous studies have examined how semiotics could aid second language (L2) learner to learn concrete words. This study aims at investigating the effect of semiotics on learning abstract words. Fifty-five Arab learners of English as a foreign…

This paper seeks to address the question how people go about intercultural differences in an institutional setting which aims to mediate between the socio-legal system and the 'outsiders' of the system, i.e. ordinary citizens, through an investigation of professional interactions between a legal advisor and her clients of Eastern European…

Multimodality has been a growing research interest in the field of applied linguistics. With the actor-network theory as an analytic framework, the purpose of the present study was to explore how university students of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) take advantage of both material and non-material semiotic resources while being…

This paper investigates a metrolingual language object and creative place-making in Dumbo, Brooklyn within the era of late capitalism. It is an analysis of how two simple letters 'O' and 'Y', when put together create two short words 'OY' and 'YO' yet carry exponential meaning about metrolingual language ideologies, language users and powerful…

Grounded in a poststructuralist postcolonial theoretical framework, this article presents the results of semiotic chain and critical discourse analyses of four years' worth of publications about China in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The authors argue that colonial tropes in the media representations of the Chinese international student…

This study explores the ways in which master thesis writers position their research in the field of English language teaching in a context where academic literacies are still a developing field. From a social semiotic perspective, this paper aims to identify the resources writers use to represent their object of study and provide a context and…

This article sets out to analyze how landscape functions in an educational context. It examines how landscape functions as an irreducible totality and as a nexus of discourse. The article focuses on the materialization of de jure and de facto discourses pertaining to languages in a primary level school in Southwest Finland. It also examines the…

This study is a critical analysis of a low-stakes in-house English as a Second Language (ESL) and English literacy test from a local program in a large city in the southwestern United States. From a critical multimodal social semiotic perspective (Kress G. Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Routledge, 2010;…

This paper examines the ways in which the ethnic minority group the Tujia in Enshi, China, engages with heritage tourism, as a complex project of designing authenticity. Authenticity is taken as part of the chronotopic phenomena of identity making: the complex interplay of multiple, nonrandom timespace frames of discourses and semiotic…

This paper focuses on the linguistic composition of commercial signs in the linguistic landscape (LL) of Athens, Greece. Previous studies have mainly been carried out in officially multilingual and multi-ethnic areas [Ben-Rafael, E., Shohamy, E., Amara, M. H., & Trumper-Hecht, N. (2006). "Linguistic landscape as symbolic construction of…