Roland Barthes as a fervent proponent of semiology believes that semiology is a branch of a comprehensive linguistics: it is the study of how language articulates the world. Semiotic codes, the paths of this articulation, accordingly underlie his attention. Barthes in a structural analysis of Balzac's "Sarrasine" in S/Z expounds five…

Multimedia educational applications convey meanings through several semiotic modes (e.g. text, image, sound, etc.). There is an urgent need for multimedia designers as well as for teachers to understand the meaning potential of these artifacts and discern the communicative purposes they serve. Towards this direction, a hermeneutic semiotic…

This case study describes my introduction to discourse analysis, documents how I broadened my perspective through subsequent readings, and presents a transdisciplinary view of discourse analysis as a way to support credible interpretations of text data. From my dissertation research that explored English Second Language students' learning of…

This paper is concerned with multimodal literacy involving the different kinds of knowledge required to fully access texts with multiple semiotic resources used in reading comprehension test tasks. Such literacy requirements have not drawn researchers' attention to date, mainly because the foreign language teaching and testing project has…

Drawing on a study of children's musical games in urban South Africa, this article employs two theoretical frames: that of multimodality and the multiliteracies pedagogy. These are applied to a contextual analysis of the forms of musicality that musical games embody and to ways of incorporating children's play into pedagogy. Based on ethnographic…

This article presents an analysis of a digital video created by a student (age 13) in a classroom setting. Since sign functioning is a key focus in theories of meaning making as it occurs through language and through other modes, my analysis focuses on the relations between signifiers as they are inscribed in her video. This analysis explores new…

As has been widely discussed, the National Research Council's (NRC) current policy in United States education advocates supporting students toward acquiring skills to engage in scientific practices. NRC policy also suggests that supporting students in the practices of science may require different approaches than what is required for supporting…

This article addresses the notion of "making it" as an early-career academic in physical education and sport pedagogy. In it, we draw on the tradition of material semiotics to reflect on our shared journeys from doctoral student to beginning scholar and beyond. By attuning ourselves to the relationality, materiality and precariousness of…

This study, conducted in a 300-level college French class with 15 students, builds on previous research on symbolic competence (Kramsch, 2009, 2011). Using a film scene and a "Semiotic Gap Activity," we examine how students construct meaning. What do students prioritize? What do they bring from their past symbolic representations? Are…

Handwritten texts carry significant information, extending beyond the meaning of their words. Modern neurology, for example, benefits from the interpretation of the graphic features of writing and drawing for the diagnosis and monitoring of diseases and disorders. This article examines how handwriting analysis can be used, and has been used…

Among the literary genres, poetry is the one that resists translation the most. Creating a new and innovative language that breaks the usual rules of the standard language with brand-new uses and meanings is probably one of the most important goals of the poet. Poetry challenges the translator to capture not only original images, exceptional…

This article discusses a relatively under-explored phenomenon that we call Tranßcripting -- writing, designing and digitally generating new scripts with elements from different scriptal and semiotic systems. The data are drawn from examples of such scripts created by multilingual Chinese users in everyday online social interaction. We analyse the…

Using semiotics theories as a guide, the qualitative examination of storytelling literature and current storytelling practitioners provides research support for a list of storytelling components. Analysis of story building components discovered from literature in comparison to the results from research questionnaire responses by current…

Background: In South Africa, developing criticality among learners is essential for their careers in school and outside school. However, knowledge and understanding of critical literacy within the schooling context is unclear, with only patchy guidance available for teachers. Objectives: An intervention project was set up to discover how community…

This paper links Systemic Functional-based multimodal discourse analysis and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher education through the workshop "Multimodal Literacy in the EFL classroom" (MLEFL). Drawing upon 'multimodal analysis for critical thinking' (MACT) pedagogy (O'Halloran et al., 2017) and the Systemic Approach to…