This article presents a study of individual video-based educational sessions with secondary trainee teachers (N = 30) observing others' teaching. Within a Peircian semiotic framework, the study was designed to deepen the researchers' understanding of video-enhanced experience in educational settings beyond the usual research areas of noticing,…

In this chapter, we analyse the co-construction of meaning by university students in romance language (RL) chat rooms, in an online platform focused on multilingual language practice and learning. This communicative situation can best be described through the concept of 'intercomprehension', i.e. a multilingual and multisemiotic communicative…

This article describes the results of a study that examined middle school students' written revisions as well as attitudes and perceptions regarding revision when paired with transmediation. Existing research on revision is thin on transmediation's affordances and students' voices regarding revision. Situated within a social semiotic, multimodal…

During a classroom-based study, eight- to ten-year-old students had multiple opportunities to develop their knowledge and understanding about semiotic resources for meaning-making in picturebooks and graphic novels. Instruction during the study included a variety of activities that focussed on a selection of elements of visual art and design, and…

This article presents a study of how teenage immigrant students, newly arrived in Norway, constructed themselves discursively through a number of identity texts. Drawing on theories from New Literacy Studies, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Social Semiotics, we analyzed a corpus of 97 multimodal identity texts. The study aimed to explore how the…

Participation in a classroom-based study provided Grade 4 students with multiple opportunities to develop their visual meaning-making skills and competences, as well as their aesthetic understanding of and critical thinking about multimodal ensembles. Intentionally-designed instruction during the multifaceted research included a variety of…

In our research and teaching we explore the value and the place of rhetoric in education. From a theoretical perspective we situate our work in different disciplines, inspired by major "turns": linguistic, cultural, anthropological/ethnographic, interpretive, semiotic, narrative, literary, rhetorical etc. In this article we engage in the…

Translanguaging has opened up spaces to recognize the dynamic multilingualism of students in classrooms taught in dominant languages, and problematized concepts such as 'additive bilingualism'. This article aims to further explore two issues that remain little understood. First, translanguaging is often seen as simply the acknowledgement or use of…

Language learning classrooms are sites of discovery not only of language, but of identity, culture, and community. The pedagogical approach described here, critical media work (CMW), integrates language teaching and social issues by using media literacy as a bridge. CMW explores antiracist discourse in popular media (digital and analog) to…

This study attempted to scrutinize the disciplinary and cross-disciplinary generic variations of textbook introductions in humanities and basic sciences with reference to the onion model. The data included a sample of 60 introductions (i.e. ten each from applied linguistics, sociology, and psychology within humanities, and ten each from biology,…

This study examines the challenges of analyzing texts that are multimodal--that is, combining more than one mode of communication, such as written text, images, video, and/or audio--and considers the theoretical and practical implications of two very different approaches. The more common current approach, which adapts the work of Halliday and…

This paper discusses how Julia Kristeva's theory can inform our understanding of unteachable moments. It proposes a pedagogical relationship that can contain breakdowns of meanings and work toward breakthroughs to new awareness, particularly related to social justice pedagogy in teacher education. First, one example from the author's own teaching…

By referring to the theory of semiology, this study aims to present how certain phrases, applications, images, and objects, which are assumed to be unnoticed in the educational process as if they were natural, could be read as signs encrypted with certain ideologically-loaded cultural codes, and to propose semiology as a method for educational…

This paper investigates the representation of social values and their ontogenetic development in English as a foreign language textbooks in Hong Kong. Adopting a social semiotic approach, it considers social values in textbooks as semantic categories which are constructed by complex semiotic discursive resources, and develops an explicit framework…

Resulting from stroke or brain injury, aphasia affects individuals' ability to produce and comprehend language, but it also creates profound social changes, limiting individuals' opportunities to communicate or to be seen as capable of communication. To address these challenges, the field of communicative sciences and disorders (CSD) has sought to…