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We noticed that when workers try to explain their mathematical practices to inquisitive outsiders, breakdowns in communication arise. We present here an example in which a worker spontaneously uses metaphors and models to facilitate explanation and communication. We analyse these, drawing on Lakoff & Johnson (1999) and Lakoff & Nunez (2000) in substance and theoretical approach. We suggest that metaphors and cultural models ground associations between academic and workplace discourse genres, and point out how sensori-motor groundings of the "basic" metaphors may afford gesture and image-schema which free discourse from formal mathematical language. In general we see breakdown repairs as being built through cultural models that extend beyond local mathematical genres which situate mathematics within academic or workplace contexts. [For complete proceedings, see ED489597.]

The current literacy crisis, which has spawned numerous studies and generated vigorous debate, is less about decreasing literacy and ability among the North American and worldwide population than it is about who controls literacy, how literacy is used, and who can use literacy. Most who claim there is a literacy crisis are reacting to the expansion of the "dominant discourse" and the broadening nature of literacy. They define literacy as something which reflects and supports a narrower definition of the dominant discourse which is largely western, white, and male dominated. This paper calls for a broadening of the definition of literacies, toward one that is more inclusive. Literacy, as defined in the paper, applies to more than just reading and writing--it encompasses any form of communication; literacies are multiple and are created and used through a "critical socio-psycho-semiotic process." And the understanding of discourses in the paper--the sayings, doings, thinkings, feelings, and valuings within a specific group--comes largely from the work of James Paul Gee (1990; 2000). The paper discusses why it is important to label literacies as critical; why semiotics is necessary in the definition of literacies; and literacies as social process. It relies on the socio-psycholinguistic reading model developed by Ken Goodman to understand how literacies work as a process. In Goodman's model, according to the paper, literacies use four cueing systems: semantic (meaning), syntactic (the grammar and rules of literacies), sensory (the medium through which the user interacts with literacies), and pragmatic (context). The paper examines each of these cueing systems in turn. (Contains 36 references.) (NKA)

Modern Western European ways of thinking are based on a print culture that uses verbal metaphors, and indigenous ways of thinking are based on an oral culture that uses visual metaphors. Visual metaphors provide a dominant mode of information processing and are used among indigenous groups to share cultural knowledge, yet Western culture is oblivious to it. One way of knowing involves reading people through nonverbal communication, but in Western culture, nonverbal communication can be virtually invisible. Problems occur when knowing and sensitive children from oral cultures such as American Indians are judged by people from cultures that do not know much about visual thinking. These children are aware of visual space, are sensitive to nonverbal communication, and understand that silence communicates. In writing English compositions for school, these children do not use the syllogistic reasoning of Aristotle because it is not part of their cultural knowledge, nor do they use the forms of logic that underlie the classical tradition of rhetoric. These students' writings have been criticized by their teachers as not having any structure. The fact that their structure is based on visual metaphor goes unnoticed. Teachers must be aware of the distinction between these two types of metaphors if they are to understand how indigenous people learn. Two dominant American Indian metaphors--the journey and the Quaternity (recurrence of the number four)--are discussed, and aspects of visual literacy that inform both aesthetics and the psychology of visual thinking are examined. (Contains 43 references.) (TD)

The New Zealand Curriculum Framework identifies seven Essential Learning Areas, namely, Languages, Mathematics, Science, Social Science, Technology, Health and Physical Education, and the Arts. These have been in the process of development since 1993, with the Arts section written in draft form in 1998 and released for consultation in 1999. Being positioned last in curriculum development implies that the Arts are at the bottom of a preferred hierarchy of knowledge promoted by the state. This has been further reinforced by the increased drive to promote literacy, numeracy, and information technology in schooling. The "knowledge economy" catch-cry in New Zealand totally ignores the notion of a "creative knowledge." In an effort to increase the perceived value of the arts, the writers of the draft "Arts Curriculum" embraced the concept of multiple literacies, which seeks to broaden the understanding of literacy in teaching and learning and to acknowledge a multiplicity of discourses within the school curriculum. Literacy should imply a mode of meaning other than the purely linguistic, it needs to incorporate visual, aural, gestural, spatial, and multimodal meanings (The New London Group, 1996). Literacies in the arts are developed as students learn in, through, and about different arts forms within the arts disciplines and use its languages to communicate and interpret meaning. This paper details the development of "The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum" and the acknowledgment within the curriculum of the notion of literacy in the arts. It takes the view that the concept of multiliteracies might be a direction for the arts to take in order to counter the pro-literacy canon embraced by the state. The paper discusses the potential of such a concept in preventing further marginalization of the arts in New Zealand schools. (Contains 22 references.) (Author/RS)

This paper suggests that the systems of representations that we use in mathematics have a cultural origin and concludes that the knowledge produced with the help of these systems of representation likewise has a cultural origin. This assertion forces a reformulation of the issue of objectivity in terms that differ from those inherited from epistemological realism. Information about cognition and historical development, cognition and context, and cognition and computing tools is included. (Contains 16 references.) (DDR)

Drawing on writings by recent post-modernist thinkers and semioticians, this paper focuses on a combination of hermeneutic and semiotic viewpoints and applies them to defining the nature of interpretation in an educational setting (e.g., text interpretation), the interpreter, and the essence of the act of comprehension and interpretation. The main examples discussed come from English as a foreign language and blend aspects of Dewey's educational thinking with the hermeneutic approach. (Contains 15 references.) (CNP)

How might comparatists view and image the world as a visual dialogue? How have representations of visual culture in comparative education discourse changed since the 1960s? This paper identifies, types, and maps the scopic regimes of modernity (that is, the technical and critical rationalist, and the hermeneutical constructivist) and postmodernity (that is, the deconstructive perspectivist) found in the field's three leading journals. Using the two axes of mimetic-heuristic and differentiation-dedifferentation, the perspectivist map opens space to all ways of seeing and representing information. It offers knowledge workers a useful new visual aesthetic based not on degrees of progress in techniques of transmission or modeling, but on a perspectivist paradigm of cultural dedifferentiation that is open to technical, cognitive, and cultural ways of seeing--that is, to the growing intellectual and visual complexity of our time. Fifteen figures and 24 endnotes are included. (LMI)

This paper draws on the observations of an international college student with an upper socio-economic background from Kenya who, prior to graduate work in the United States, had almost no contact with people with physical disabilities. The paper explores the construction of accessibility and disability on a college campus as viewed from a semiotic perspective through a research project that was conducted with a student with physical disabilities who used a motorized wheel chair. The paper contrasts an initial reaction to the freedom of accessibility the person with disability appears to have in the United States with the reality of a case study of a wheel-chair confined student. The commentary considers how signs of accessibility (such as the ramp sign) operate at three levels: (1) the iconic (signifying access or a way in/out); (2) indexical (as a marker of a society accessible by all citizens, even those with disabilities); and (3) symbolic (as a representation of freedom of movement, convenience, and inclusion). At this third symbolic level, the paper suggests that the ramp, when inconveniently though legally located, represents confinement, inconvenience, restriction of freedom, and a sense of censored access. The paper also examines ways that a person can be "dis-abled" by a culture through denial of a person's abilities or "enabled" and empowered. (Contains 11 references.) (DB)

In a discussion of the role of language in education, education is viewed as a semiotic apprenticeship, or opportunity to gain the cultural tools and practices for meaning-making in construction of knowledge. This process occurs through guided participation in discipline-based forms of inquiry. In this enterprise, language is seen as having a special function, providing tools both to mediate participation in an activity and to reflect on that activity. The ways in which written and oral discourse contribute to inquiry in the classroom and in class activities are examined. It is proposed further that this learner-centered view of the classroom as a community of inquiry suggests re-examination of the role of the teacher, and adoption of the teacher's role as active participant in inquiry. (MSE)

As material objects, texts are as much the product of visual semiotic codes as of linguistic ones. And throughout history, verbal texts have been combined with nonverbal, visual modes of presenting information, taking a stance toward information and readers, and organizing parts into wholes. The major challenge to creating multimodal texts in the near future will be a lack of multimedial literacy. A more fundamental understanding of existing cultural conventions in communities for combining verbal and nonverbal elements in multimedial texts is needed. To understand how meaning is made simultaneously in several semiotic modalities, common features of all semiotic systems must be identified, i.e., the presentational, the orientational, and the organizational features. Scientific and technical texts have long preserved a tradition of incorporating nonverbal visual-graphic elements as integral and normal parts of their genres. What it means to "read" a text of this kind depends on the literacy practice involved; that is, on the cultural activity as part of which meaning is being made with this text. (Contains 31 references.) (NH)

A visually literate person's lexicon for interpreting visual statements, without regard to medium, could include an eclectic array of possibilities. Some definitions and demonstrations of the various approaches are presented. The premodern, or connoisseur's approach, is characterized by a central concern with the assessment of quality, and such assessment was predicated on a deep conviction of a hierarchical aesthetic. The connoisseur's approach encompasses the study of iconography with traditional symbolism and traditional social interpretations. A modern, or structural, analysis entails looking beyond subject matter to the underlying structure of a visual statement. Modern art has celebrated structure and pure form as an end in itself. Postmodernist thought rejects structure especially, along with most previous approaches to interpreting visual statements. As visual communication becomes more important, semiotics, hermeneutics, and deconstruction are increasingly advocated. Whatever the approach, the examination of the visual statement leads to better understanding and appreciation of a broader range of visual statements. (Contains 22 references.) (SLD)

This article presents the difficulties literary pragmaticists have with literary genre, and asks to what extent linguists belonging to the Halliday tradition might be able to help. Literary pragmatists need a taxonomical apparatus that will apply to genres of all kinds, literary or otherwise. They also need to describe how different genres help people perceive and parcel things up, and how genres function within sociocultural contexts. It seems that Hallidayan linguists may well have something to suggest here, even if their genre thinking is not yet fully developed to their own satisfaction. Furthermore, literary pragmaticists need to talk about changes in genres and in their relation to context. Here it is not immediately clear whether Halliday linguists can help. The question is: Do Hallidayans, as a matter of either principle or convenient practice, confine themselves to a synchronic approach? (Contains 39 references.) (JL)

Although television is highly dependent on language and semiotic analysis, its form can best be analyzed through the structural notion of transformation. The critic's task becomes the articulation of structural laws intrinsic to television. One such law has to do with how television structures time. Television programming transforms action into half-hour or hour-long episodes that can continue over several nights, weeks, months or years, sometimes in a simple sequence of recurrent patterns, sometimes incrementally, and sometimes even by repeating individual segments. The structural coherence of the individual episodes allows the audience closure, the ability to put together the parts of a greater whole. Instead of a compression, in a literary sense, of character development, usually unfolding over a period of two hours, serialization demands repetition and expansion. It diminishes the need for resolution and shifts the emphasis to process. The use of temporal structure also helps build a web of connections that enlarges and complicates characters and allows for sustained thematic treatment. Given the current linguistic bias in semiotics, such considerations of television's aesthetic structure would most likely slip through the semiologist's analytic net. Structuralism as a methodological tool, therefore, must be rescued from the semiologists if it is going to be useful in television criticism. (HOD)

When education (teaching and/or learning) is considered to be an art, then it seems obvious that the methods of artistic inquiry would be appropriate analysis techniques. Such analysis seems to be rare or non-existent in educational technology. Semiotics, the theory of signs, provides one such set of methodologies for examining text. This presentation uses a variety of semiotic critical methods to explore the products and processes of educational technology as text. Semiotics is often divided into syntactics, semantics and pragmatics, and semiotic criticism can be based on just one or two of these divisions, or it can include all three. Syntactic criticism focuses on the structure of the work. These structures can be assessed simply in terms of the evolution of structural form (and the possibility of revolutionary change in form), or the forms can be evaluated in relation to the use of the work. Semantic criticism stresses meaning manifest in the work. While semantics are normally applied to textual materials, critics have also used semantics as a formal approach to visual literacy concepts. Pragmatics link antecedents (causes), features of the work, and results. Such inquiry can address unintended or unanticipated effects a work might have on its audience. (CGD)

The first section of this paper outlines the aims of the socio-semiotic way of looking at cross-cultural lexicology, including its ability to affect research methodology, objects, and goals, and argues that it is in accordance with an integral concept of linguistics. In the second section, the socio-semiotic approach is contrasted with the system-oriented, knowledge-oriented, and behavior-oriented views of lexicology. The final section provides macroscopic results, microscopic results, and cross-language comparison to illustrate what cross-cultural lexicology can do under socio-semiotic auspices. (18 references) (MES)

During a 1985 symposium in Chicago sponsored by the American Society for Curriculum Development, Noreen Garman, Carl Glickman, and Madeline Hunter discussed the question of whether clinical supervision should be used for formal evaluation and contract renewal. While Hunter's answer was a qualified "yes," Garman and Glickman both felt strongly that it should not. Nevertheless, evaluation of teachers in schools is often tied to the "Hunter Model," even though Hunter expressed reservations regarding such use. Inquiring why this is so, this paper argues that the language used by proponents of clinical supervision implies a form of evaluation that is generated to judge the outcomes of the process, regardless of the original intent of these proponents. A second proposition discussed is that if the language used to describe a "model,""strategy," or "practice" is literal, it implies a literal evaluation process, whereas if it is figurative, it implies a figurative process. The third proposition is that in a society caught up in rapid technological change, with a need for fast answers and definitive directions, those responsible for evaluation of instruction naturally tend to develop and use literal, not figurative or imaginative, evaluation instruments and practices. These propositions are investigated through analysis of the use of literal or figurative language in the text of the Hunter, Garman, and Glickman symposium. Findings are that Hunter's model of clinical supervision is based on literal language, Garman's is based on figurative language, and Glickman's is based on both, but predominantly figurative. But in a country possessed with the need for literal accountability of their teachers and schools, Hunter's language has naturally come to predominate. (TE)

Since visual knowledge of the specialties within graphics and photography is difficult to pinpoint because it is nonverbal and intuitive, graphics educators fall back on teaching technical expertise--the procedures and equipment used for newspapers, magazines, and television stations. For centuries visual knowledge was the realm of the unlettered, the communication system for the ignorant, and only in the modern era has meaning been found for the term "visual literacy." By 1920, Roger Fry had proposed that all art could be seen as essentially an arrangement of shapes, lines, and colors--a concept that formed the basis for formalist criticism, now pervasive in the thought and teaching of almost all things visual. While a visual language was emerging in art, the older definition (art as storytelling) persisted in the popular mind and was adopted in the early seventies by the "visual literacy" movement in education. However, reading pictures is not exactly like reading language. The definition of visual literacy might include recognition of the value of visual experience. Instead of seeing only symbols and their hidden meanings, the adult eye might be trained to see their textures and patterns and to know enough of the formal elements to interpret ordinary visual images. Higher forms of visual literacy might include the principles of design, such as unity and proportion, derived from classical theories of aesthetics. Graphics instructors sometimes confuse technical computer skills with real visual knowledge, but intuitive aspects of visual knowledge could be explored in the computerized studio. This applied arts approach draws on theoretical developments of art and on the applied nature of professional and technical education. (Footnotes and references are appended.) (NKA)

This paper analyzes two student papers, "Pygmalion" and "Waiting to Inhale," in terms of the type of thinking demonstrated in them. It examines the difference between higher order patterns of thinking evident in advanced or adult writers and patterns of thinking in young writers or students. The study reported in the paper builds on an earlier pilot study which concluded that expert writers engage in more processing activities than student writers do. The paper calls into question the value of writing models for young aspiring writers. It begins by offering a broad background in semiotics and the Piagetian perspective on the relationship among referents; it then reviews dialectical or relativistic thinking as they apply to assessment in composition. From there, it contrasts traditional and progressive approaches to composition assessment. Toward the end of enriching traditional models of assessment and creating an explicit vocabulary for the purpose of assessing students with an enriched model, the paper defines four types of high order interpretants or textual relationships used by expert writers: (1) dialectical thinking; (2) contextual thinking; (3) conceptualization; and (4) paradigmatic thinking. While these high order patterns of thinking are present in the work of expert writers, they are not often available to students. (Contains appendixes of student writing and 66 references.) (TB)

Examines the advantages and disadvantages of books on tape for children. Analyzes some taped readings. Concludes that they make heavier use of stereotypes than written texts and in doing so raise ideological questions. Suggests that tapes offer shortcuts to semiotic competence, to interpreting the world through a kind of shorthand that is equally valuable and dangerous. (TB)

Introduces alternative approach to a controversial issue in Czech linguistics--the semantics of verbs of the type "rikavat,""delavat," and so on. The article demonstrates that these verbs can be called habitual verbs in the Peircean sense of the term "habit," and the key to the semantics of these verbs is recognizing what is cognitively or semiotically involved in the conceptualization of habit. (47 references) (CK)

Endorses recent arguments for more study of writing that shapes and directs the production of material artifacts and for considering writing as one semiotic mode among others. Considers a case of "nonwritten" symbolic production, architectural design, for what it may suggest for the study and teaching of writing. (TB)

Contains a response to a review of Tobin's "Semiotics and Linguistics," which criticizes the reviewer's characterizations of the three linguistic schools upon which the book is based. A response by the reviewer defends his assertions about the work. (MDM)

Describes the "special destiny-special faculty" paradigm that has dominated western thinking about the nature and origins of language and argues instead that language systems are like technologies and that language acquisition and use involves a range of capacities and skills, a view that could be called the "mosaic development paradigm." (15 references) (LR)

Reports a six-year study of explicit references to young children's small physical stature in an Australian newspaper. Suggests that when newspaper representations of children and childhood are examined for their focus on children's diminutive size, two conflicting themes emerge: endearment versus depreciation. Suggests that these size-value tensions have an impact on our images of the young child. (AA)

Discusses what happens when students and teachers are encouraged to use multiple ways of knowing in mediating their experiences with the world. Suggests that a good language arts program expands the communication potential of all learners through the orchestration and use of multiple ways of knowing for purposes of ongoing interpretation and inquiry into the world. (RS)

Discusses the identity-forming power of translation in advertising copy. In the marketing of goods and services across cultural boundaries, an understanding of culture and semiotics that goes well beyond both language and design is involved. Translators must understand marketing, the legal jurisdictions of their market, how cultural differences affect marketing, and other factors. A debate on these topics follows this article. (15 references) (Author/CK)

Claims made by positivist and pluralist histographers about the history of linguistics are evaluated in light of recent theoretical developments in semiotics, hermeneutics, history, and linguistics. (41 references) (Author/VWL)

Discusses various aspects of visual communication--light, semiotics, codes, photography, typography, and visual literacy--within the context of the communications technology area of technology education. (SK)

Discusses comments about and responses to an article on semiotics by Donald J. Cunningham in the June 1992 issue of the "Educational Psychology Review." Discusses the semiotic method of juxtaposition, juxtaposing a menace being posed to reading teachers with the menace experienced in W. W. Jacobs' classic ghost story "The Monkey's Paw." (SR)

Reviews an article by D.J. Cunningham, "Education Psychology: Steps toward an Educational Semiotic" on the differing views of knowledge held in the fields of educational psychology and semiotics. (SR)

Explains that semiology provides a broad perspective for analyzing the range of signs, their differences in form and function, along with the relative efficiency of different signs for different purposes and situations. Applies some general semiological notions to the printed page. (SR)

Summarizes the work of Marcel Danesi who, drawing on the fields of semiotics and neuro-psycholinguistics, has developed an excellent text for the teaching of Italian ("Adesso: A Functional Approach to Italian"). This text, along with his numerous manuals and articles on language teaching, documents his contribution to the field of linguistics. (LET)

Describes the use of signs in Elizabeth George Speare's "The Sign of the Beaver," in which a settler youth and a young Indian learn to communicate by signs, and how the signs reveal much about each character's culture. Summarizes the plot elements of the book, including characters who are not as sympathetic to the Indian point of view. (PA)

Categorizes attempts to account for how viewers garner meanings from motion pictures as either semiotic, realist, or conventionalist. Proposes an alternative explanation based on J. J. Gibson's ecological theory of perception. Offers his concept of "affordances" as the key to an explanation of how meanings in motion pictures are generated and constrained. (RS)

Semiotics is the study of signs of all kinds. How the definitions and specialized terminologies of semiotics are related to curriculum is discussed, and how semiotics can be integrated into specific instructional activities is examined. An illustrative model is included. (RM)

Argues that structuralism needs to be given a wider base than that of the highly specialized studies that are usually cited as examples. Rather, extension should be made philosophically, in the direction of phenomenology, and, practically, with some of the work being done in linguistics. (HOD)

Saint-Exupery's story, "The Little Prince," is analyzed from the point of view of the structures through which the author wishes to inspire and instruct the reader. The use of disguised didactic discourse and the manipulation of words toward this end are examined. (MSE)

Refutes points made in an earlier published article on the crisis in English teaching, particularly references to the threat of "structuralist arguments." (AEA)

This essay develops a framework for the application of semiotics to foreign language (FL) pedagogy. The state of the art and rationale of applied semiotics are discussed. The teacher will find that the semiotic approach aids in the teaching of languages by making the student aware of what is going on in a language act and thus, through redundancy, enhancing memory and insight into cross-cultural communication. As an example of how the semiotic approach may be brought to bear in a classroom situation, an exercise is described in which the symbols and graphics of the "Guide Michelin" are transformed into a narrative through a process of transcoding. Many types of semiotic systems are encountered in the FL classroom. However, since language is the only semiotic system into which all the others can be translated, an FL pedagogy based on applied semiotics can help to restore the balance among the systems, a balance that is necessary in order to master the means of communication used by a given culture. The synthesis of the scientific and creative aspects of a semiotic approach will be embodied in a process of material selection, semiotic analysis ("deconstruction"), and reconstruction along lines mapped out by the teacher. (JB)

The essays in this book focus on the role of the reader in textual interpretation. Specifically, they examine "open" and "closed" texts. The three essays in Part I deal with both verbal and nonverbal texts. The first considers musical compositions that leave considerable autonomy to the individual performer and also discusses the phenomenon of the "unfinished work" in contemporary art and aesthetic theory. The second and third essays examine how the procedures of aesthetic manipulation of language produce the interpretive cooperation of the addressee. Closed texts are represented by examples from popular culture in the three essays in Part II. These examine the sociopolitical assumptions implicit in Superman comic books, the relationship between rhetoric and ideology in the fiction of Eugene Sue, and the narrative structure in Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. The two essays in Part III provide a theoretical framework for understanding the semiotic strategies of open and closed texts. The first investigates the contributions of contemporary semantics to the study of narrative; the second connects the modalities of textual interpretation with the problem of possible worlds and discusses a story by Alphonse Allais. Appendixes contain an empirical test of the Model Reader as a textual construct and excerpts from "A Most Parisian Episode" by Alphonse Allais. (FL)