The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of the difficulties faced by students when working with different representations of vectors, planes and their intersections in R[superscript 3]. Duval's theoretical framework on semiotic representations is used to design a set of evaluating activities, and later to analyze student work. The…

This paper aims to explain how semiotics and constructivism can collaborate in an educational epistemology by developing a joint approach to prescientific conceptions. Empirical data and findings of constructivist research are interpreted in the light of Peirce's semiotics. Peirce's semiotics is an anti-psychologistic logic (CP 2.252; CP 4.551; W…

The aim of this article is to explore how children use and reuse semiotic resources in their writing of hybrid genres in school. In focus are children's use and reuse of semiotic resources from both earlier literacy events at school and literacy events they have experienced at home or in their leisure time. This double focus is rare in previous…

This paper presents a study aimed at investigating the didactic potentiality of the combined use of two different kinds of artefacts for the purpose of constructing and conceptualizing mathematical meanings related to the notion of axial symmetry. In our view, the process of meanings construction can be fostered by the use of adequate artefacts,…

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…

The increasing occurrence of multilingualism in the educational sphere is challenging teachers to deal with the coexistence of different languages in the classroom. The present paper presents the analysis of language portraits as a tool to make students' multilingualism visible by using colours to represent their multilingual repertoires. Through…

We explore the consequences of letting the incremental and integrative nature of language processing inform the design of competence grammar. What emerges is a view of grammar as a system of local monotonic constraints that provide a direct characterization of the signs (the form-meaning correspondences) of a given language. This…

There are two focal points to this article. One is to address Julia Kristeva's theoretical corpus in the context of philosophy of education. Kristeva's notion of subject in process problematises education with its habitual emphasis on "product". Another is to consider her impact from the perspective of edusemiotics. Edusemiotics is a new…

The literature on gestures describes how they often comprise iconic, deictic and metaphoric dimensions, but the interplay between these dimensions can be very subtle and nuanced. Due to the abstract nature of the subject, the use of gestures in the learning of mathematics means that the metaphoric dimension is often prominent. However, iconic and…

This article examines science teaching and learning by drawing on Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of learning and development as well as a social semiotic perspective. The latter perspective includes in semiosis the science equipment, science phenomena, teacher and student actions, talk and writing that are involved in science teaching and…

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…

This exploratory study focuses on international students' usage of digital tools in order to understand what role such tools play in the transition to their new academic environments and what learning opportunities they provide. Not only do digital tools accompany international students' social, cultural, and linguistic transitions as they move to…

In this paper, we present a case study of a pair of students as they use nondisciplinary communicative practices to mechanistically reason about binary star dynamics. To do so, we first review and bring together the theoretical perspectives of social semiotics and embodied cognition, therein developing a new methodological approach for analyzing…

This study aims to investigate the influence of story creation on young EFL learners' reading performance. Action research was adopted to examine the effects of two different story reading projects in a library setting in Taiwan. Each project comprised a group of 19 young EFL learner from Grades 4 to 6 (aged 10-12). The first group's activities…