Digital artifacts have the potential for augmenting the interest of students and the quality of learning environments. However, it is still common to find technology being inserted in learning settings without a closer connection to the learners' contemporary world. In this paper we report on results of a qualitative research conducted to address…

We examined the performance of English language learners (ELLs) and non-ELLs on Grade 4 and Grade 5 mathematics content knowledge (CK) and academic language (AL) tests. CK and AL items had different semiotic loads (numbers of different types of semiotic features) and different semiotic structures (relative frequencies of different semiotic…

Balancing content and students' participation in the mathematics classroom is an area of both practical and theoretical interest. In this article we relate and contribute to these two interests by analyzing classroom data from an intervention project aiming at teaching mathematics through problem solving. The study shows that several aspects such…

This thesis explores the questions of how a teacher guides students to see concepts, and the role of gesture and gesture viewpoints in mediating the process of guidance. To examine these questions, two sociocultural theoretical frameworks--Radford's cultural-semiotic theory of knowledge objectification (e.g., 2003), and Goldman's Points of Viewing…

An event-related brain potentials (ERP) experiment was carried out to investigate how and when accentuation influences temporally selective attention and subsequent semantic processing during on-line spoken language comprehension, and how the effect of accentuation on attention allocation and semantic processing changed with the degree of…

Despite accumulating evidence that cortical motor areas, particularly the lateral premotor cortex, are activated during language comprehension, the question of whether motor processes help mediate the semantic encoding of language remains controversial. To address this issue, we examined whether low frequency (1 Hz) repetitive transcranial…

Errors differ in degree of seriousness. We asked whether preschoolers would use the magnitude of an informant's errors to decide if that informant would be a good source of information later. Four- and 5-year-olds observed two informants incorrectly label familiar objects, but one informant's errors were closer to the correct answer than the…

In this paper, we use the work of philosopher Gilles Chatelet to rethink the gesture/diagram relationship and to explore the ways mathematical agency is constituted through it. We argue for a fundamental philosophical shift to better conceptualize the relationship between gesture and diagram, and suggest that such an approach might open up new…

Just as syntax differentiates coherent sentences from scrambled word strings, the comprehension of sequential images must also use a cognitive system to distinguish coherent narrative sequences from random strings of images. We conducted experiments analogous to two classic studies of language processing to examine the contributions of narrative…

In a previous study, the onto-semiotic approach was employed to analyse the mathematical notion of different coordinate systems, as well as some situations and university students' actions related to these coordinate systems in the context of multivariate calculus. This study approaches different coordinate systems through the process of change of…

Framed in theories of social semiotics, this descriptive multiple case study examined six middle school teachers' use of gestures during one school year as they each taught two different subject areas: earth science, language arts, mathematics, and/or social studies. The data, which included field notes and photographs from 354 lessons and 151…

This qualitative case study examines the affordances and constraints of an intergenerational multimodal arts curriculum that was designed to expand communication and identity options for children and elder participants. The authors drew on actor-network theory to conceptualize curriculum as a network effect and refer to literature on multimodal…

This paper refers to the concept of semiotic and theoretic control describing resources to conduct decisions in epistemic processes. We consider an argumentation process from a complex problem-solving activity involving different conceptual frames related to parabolas. Using a micro-analytical interpretative lens, we will show that, in order to…

The premise of this article is the usefulness of Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic theory when it is used in the activity of decoding or recouping meaning from "pure" dance works. It begins with a survey of the field of semiotics and although it concentrates on sign theory as formulated by Peirce, other principles of semiotics such as theories of…

Higher education institutions are increasingly interested in offering more flexible teaching and learning delivery methods that are often independent of place. Where foreign language learning is concerned, telecollaboration is gaining ground. This paper focuses on synchronous webconferencing-supported teaching and examines how different semiotic…