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There is a significant amount of research literature on the importance of identifying and building on students' experiences and ideas for making sense of the natural world, especially when engaging in science practices. Simultaneously, approaches to creating justice-oriented science education promote the need to focus on the diverse sense-making repertoires that students, especially those from historically marginalized communities, bring to science classrooms. However, when it comes to emergent bi/multilingual students, science education has favored narrow definitions of what ways of communicating are seen as productive for figuring out natural phenomena, privileging English-based academic vocabulary. In this article, we investigate the myriad conceptual and semiotic resources that third-grade emergent bilingual students developed and used when explaining sound production. Additionally, we explore how students investigated the sounds produced by a string instrument and unpacked the how and whys that give rise to the pitch of the sounds they heard. Our analyses indicate that: (1) students created mechanistic explanations that identified how changes to the salient physical features of strings affected the pitch of the sounds; (2) students created and laminated multiple semiotic resources when sharing their observations and explanations, particularly sound symbolisms; and (3) students navigated both semiotic convergence and divergence as they worked toward conceptual convergence. Based on our findings, we argue that justice-oriented science learning environments must become spaces where emergent bilingual students can build on all their conceptual, semiotic, and cultural resources, without being policed, as they engage science practices.

Exploring how the information flow of social studies textbook spreads is negotiated in teacher-led interaction, the concern of this study is the conscious and critical use of teaching material in diverse student groups. The study involved a teacher and her Grade 6 students in a school with many migrant language learners. The data was gathered by observations, field notes, voice recordings, and the collection of teaching materials. Using social semiotic theory of visual design, the analysis of the textbook used in instruction shows that the layout perpetuated a Western-centric view of a divided world, along with an individualistic and anthropocentric view of environmental sustainability. The oral interaction, highlighting different text elements, largely reinforced the meaning perspectives promoted in the textbook. However, on occasion, the students were positioned to take a more analytical stance. Implications for using knowledge about information flow in textbooks to promote critical literacy practices in teaching are discussed.

In an increasingly globalised and multilingual world, the use of different scripts in the same semiotic landscape is an increasingly frequent and widespread phenomenon. For this reason, it is vital to conduct research focusing on multiscriptality in order to better understand the linguistic and semiotic functions of the use of multiple scripts that have become more or less officialised by the political-administrative power. This study examines the use of Latin characters in Greece and Bulgaria, the only two European Union member societies that formally adopt different scripts. Using both a qualitative and a quantitative approach, we analyse the coexistence of the national and Latin alphabets in the graphic texts of commercial signs in two urban areas: the Ladadika district in Thessaloniki, Greece and the Kapana district in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. The results show that the advancement of the Latin alphabet is not homogeneous; sometimes unconventionally represents the national language; is not completely preferred to the recessive national script, but creates with it new orthographic-communicative forms; and can take place regardless of the overwhelming prestige of Global English. This paper demonstrates the importance of studying multiscriptality and the Romanisation process in the context of contemporary multilingualism.

The topic of linguistic landscapes (LLs) is very important in the area of sociolinguistics of multilingual societies. A linguistic landscape reflects the underlying ideologies regarding languages and their speakers, linguistic diversity, language statuses and perceived values. This study investigated multilingual LL of Cyprus under the conceptual framework of Geo-semiotics by implementing an in-depth qualitative and quantitative landscape analysis of visible semiotic signs in public space, trying to interpret their indexicality and deeper layers of meaning in relation to multilingualism situation in the country, the link between discourse and space, as well as the perceptions and attitudes of the Greek Cypriot population towards multilingualism and multilingual LL. We used photographic material in our data collection - 4,200 photos of all geographical areas of Cyprus, which were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively and interpreted in terms of language, arrangement of displayed text and images, LL genre, visual semiotics, placement and surroundings in line with the principles of the symbolic construction of the public space. It was found that sign readers have a positive attitude towards multilingualism and multilingual signs in Cyprus and that the LL in Cyprus is complex and unique and is related to the political economy of language and space.

Reforms within science education strive to shift early science instruction (K-2) so students have ample sense-making opportunities to construct scientific explanations. Classroom discussions play a key role in supporting these endeavors. This requires that classroom discussions are shaped in ways that foster scientific instruction and learning. In this study, we take a social semiotic perspective on Goffman's notions of frames and participation framework to explore how a first-grade teacher accessed and supported his students' scientific explanation construction within whole-class discussions. Our research questions ask how scientific explanations are framed during science discussions and how this framing influences student scientific explanations and participation in science talk. Evidence suggests that the teacher's framing resulted in miscues regarding the frame and participation framework necessary to participate in the discussion. When students encountered these miscues, their participation was thwarted and opportunities for articulating scientific sense-making were lost. Implications for this study identify the importance of semiotic resources for framing science instruction during classroom discussions and the architecture of interactional spaces.

Social semiotic discussions about the role played by representations in effective teaching and learning in areas such as physics have led to theoretical proposals that have a strong common thread: in order to acquire an appropriate understanding of a particular object of learning, access to the disciplinary relevance aspects in the representations used calls for the attainment of representational competence across a particular "critical constellation of systematically used semiotic resources (which are referred to as" modes, "see more on this later)." However, an affirming empirical investigation into the relationship between a particular object of learning and different representational formulations, particularly with large numbers of students, is missing in the literature, especially in the context of university-level physics education. To start to address, this research shortfall the positioning for this article is that such studies need to embrace the complexities of student thinking and application of knowledge. To achieve this, both factor and network analyses were used. Even though both approaches are grounded in different frameworks, for the task at hand, both approaches are useful for analyzing clustering dynamics within the responses of a large number of participants. Both also facilitate an exploration of how such clusters may relate to the semiotic resource formulation of a representation. The data were obtained from a questionnaire given to 1,368 students drawn from 12 universities across 7 countries. The questionnaire deals with the refraction of light in introductory-level physics and involves asking students to give their best prediction of the relative visual positioning of images and objects in different semiotically constituted situations. The results of both approaches revealed no one-to-one relationship between a particular representational formulation and a particular cluster of student responses. The factor analysis used correct answer responses to reveal clusters that brought to the fore three different complexity levels in relation to representation formulation. The network analysis used all responses (correct and incorrect) to reveal three structural patterns. What is evident from the results of both analyses is that they confirm two broad conclusions that have emerged from social semiotic explorations dealing with representations in relation to attempting to optimize teaching and learning. The first, which is linked to a facilitating-awareness perspective, is that any given disciplinary visual representation can be expected to evoke a dispersed set of knowledge structures, which is referred to as their "relevance structure." Thus, the network analysis results can be seen as presenting a unique starting point for studies aiming to identify such "relevance structure." The second broad conclusion is that disciplinary visual representation can and often does contain more "disciplinary-relevant aspects" than what may be directly visible in a given representation. These are referred to as the "appresent" aspects that need to become part of the total awareness needed by someone to constitute an intended meaning. The results of the factor analysis can then also be seen to be a way of capturing "all" the disciplinary-relevant aspects (both present and appresent). Educational implications are discussed.

Background: Science teaching and learning, as discursive practices, occur through the utilization of various semiotic modes. Gestures play a pivotal role as an embodied mode that acts in conjunction with speech in oral communication settings, such as classrooms. Previous research on gestures in chemistry and science education has illuminated how interactions involving different types of gestures can enhance learning opportunities for students. However, the investigation of recurrent gestures and their potential function as emblems in classroom discourse remains unexplored. Purpose: The objective of this article is to illustrate how catchments or recurrent gestures were constructed, used, and, to some extent, evolved into emblems within the interaction between an organic chemistry teacher and her students throughout an entire semester. Sample, design and methods: For the duration of an entire semester, we non-intrusively observed and recorded video footage of one class from an introductory organic chemistry course taught by an experienced university teacher. Our analysis to identify recurrent gestures involved a thorough examination of the lesson recordings. In addition, we scrutinized other semiotic modes that coincided with the recurrent gestures and assessed the metafunction of the words spoken during gesturing. Results: During our observation, we noted the occurrence of 23 catchments, with four of them recurring more than 100 times throughout the semester. These four recurrent gestures were closely tied to fundamental concepts considered crucial in the realm of organic chemistry. Remarkably, three out of these four catchments were consistently associated with visual representations. Conclusion: Recurrent gestures serve as a means to embody and impart materiality to exceedingly abstract content. By employing such gestures, the teacher managed to associate unfamiliar and abstract domains with familiar and concrete domains. This process of materialization and embodiment aids in perceiving these concepts as tangible entities that can be manipulated in accordance with their own rules.

Background: In the field of science education, adults often set up practical-based activities with the idea of stimulating children's reasoning and approaching science in a playful way. Although the potential role of objects in stimulating social practices has been considered in the literature, how teachers work on semiotic aspects of argumentation is still less explored. Purpose: In this paper, the purpose is to identify how practice-based experiences settled up by teachers shape children's argumentation in science education. Sample design and methods: We analyzed argumentation in science tasks involving a total of 39 children (6-7 years old) and their three teachers, coming from two different classrooms of cycle 1 (Harmos, grades 3-4) recruited in the French speaking-part of Switzerland. The tasks were video-recorded and then transcribed. Through the lenses of the pragma-dialectical approach, we selected the argumentative discussions emerging during the experiences and we performed a qualitative analysis of these interactions, by looking at different semiotic resources: speech, gaze direction, deictic gestures, and position of physical objects. Results: The findings show that teachers play a crucial role in sustaining children's argumentation by the integration of different semiotic resources during the activities. Conclusion: As argumentation in classroom evolves through the mobilization of various communicative tools, the present study can contribute to strengthen the interplay between different channels of interaction during science education at primary school.

Background: In learning astronomy, students need to shift between 3D and 2D representations involving complex interactions between the body and material environment. Little attention has been paid to the iconic nature of this astronomical diagramming. Purpose: This research explored the value for students of diagramming to reveal the structural relationships of astronomical phenomena. The study aimed to (1) operationalise Charles Peirce's pragmatist semiotics to analyse students' bodily and material reasoning (2) identify the iconic nature of students' diagramming through Stjernfelt's activating of Peirce's iconicity. Sample: Two students (a pair) from a class of 30 Year 7 students (12 years old) and their teacher (1) from a government secondary school in Melbourne, Australia. Design and Methods: A micro-ethnographic approach to the analysis of video/audio records and student artefacts was utilised in the context of three moments from a 1 hr lesson on astronomy. This data was analysed using Peirce's sign types of icon, index and symbol to construct a triadic account of the bodily and material nature of students' reasoning as diagramming. Results: The two students determined, by revealing structural relationships with their bodies as well as a mini-whiteboard and a torch and globe, that the Sun is higher in the sky in Summer than Winter due to the Earth's rotational axis with a tilt (of 23.5 degrees) and its elliptical orbit around the Sun. Conclusion: For students to transduct between 3D and 2D astronomical representations, they need to coordinate space-based and Earth-based perspectives through bodily and material diagramming that makes apparent key structural relationships (i.e. iconicity).

Background: With a growing new materialism paradigm and research on multimodality, there is an increasing attention on the role of material objects in science teaching and learning. However, there is currently no available framework, coding scheme, or method of inquiry to specifically analyze the use of material objects in science meaning-making. Purpose: This paper presents and discusses two analytical frameworks developed to examine teachers' and students' interaction with material objects during classroom discourse. Design and methods: The first analytical framework was theoretically informed by multimodal interaction analysis (MIA), focusing on humans' situated interaction using embodied and disembodied modes located in the material world. The second framework was informed by social semiotics multimodal analysis (SSMA), focusing on material interaction as a semiotic mode with unique affordances for sign-makers to make meaning alongside other semiotic modes (e.g. speech, gesture). Sample: Both frameworks are used to analyze two vignettes of classroom discourse generated from video data to illustrate their applications, coding procedures, and interpretative potential. Results: The MIA-informed framework highlighted the dynamic and reciprocal relations between students' experiences and the transformation of materials, while the SSMA-informed framework highlighted the subtle meanings constructed with the unique affordances of the material mode. Conclusion: The affordances and limitations of the two frameworks are discussed, along with their compatibility and complementary relations. This work contributes to the emerging field of materiality in science education research and provides a foundation for future studies on the analysis of material interaction in science meaning-making.

We propose a semiotic framework to underpin a posthumanist philosophy of education, as contrasted to technological determinism. A recent approach to educational processes as semiotic phenomena lends itself as a philosophy to understand the current interplay between education and technology. This view is aligned with the transhumanist movement to defend techno-scientific progress as fundamental to human development. Particularly, we adopt a semiotic approach to education to tackle certain tensions in current debates on the human. Transhumanism scholars share the optimistic belief that there is no limit to how the ethical use of technology can help alleviate suffering and increase our health and wisdom. From this perspective, it appears possible to acquire capacities that require rethinking the notion of human altogether. For others, this undermining of essentialist concepts of humanity entails serious risks, especially related to ethical egalitarianism. We adopte the perspective of edusemiotics, a framework that brings together semiotics, educational theory and philosophy of education. As a theoretical-practical framework, edusemiotics affords a hermeneutic and semiotic method for our approach. Peirce's logic of signs is used to analyze socio- educational interactions as environmental. We observe two lines of thought. On the one hand, technological transhumanism enhances Cartesian mind--body dualism. On the other hand, philosophical posthumanism seeks to overcome this dichotomy. The former proposal construes human transformation as an artifactualization derived from techno-scientific enhancements. The latter position proposes an integrative posthumanism, capable not only to include edusemiotic theory but also to rethink the concept of learning as mutual to that of human.

We explored the semiotic choices children in grades 1-6 made that nurtured embodied, dramatizing performances in science classes at urban public schools, serving predominantly students of color in a large US city. We studied how such choices in school and home settings (when instruction was remote during the COVID-19 pandemic) were implicated in the children's knowledge and identity construction and related to available resources and positionings. Multimodality and social semiotics, social practice theory, and positioning theory were the three theoretical anchors that guided the study, along with sociocultural and sociopolitical framings of science education. The study took place in the context of the multi-year collaboration STAGE (Science Theatre for Advancing Generative Engagement) among teachers and university educators designing and studying pedagogies of embodiment as part of students' engagement in school science. The ethnographic design of the larger research allowed us to engage over a school year with each class. The focus of this study is on classes of three teachers, who collaborated with a teaching artist, using data from video-recordings, fieldnotes, and conversations with students and teachers. The findings point to the generative nature of embodiments in terms of both the knowledge and identities that the children were constructing and the factors that shaped that generativity. These include (a) the resources available, (b) the children's own particular interests and sources of excitement, and (c) the simultaneous use of multiple semiotic tools that offer different affordances for meaning making. The findings affirm that multimodal embodied performances children design and create in school spaces (classrooms and settings for larger school gatherings, like auditoria) and at home provide opportunities to desettle expected axiological, ontological, and epistemological norms that often dominate science teaching. The power of dramatizing and of performing arts is facilitating the development of connections, solidarity, and feelings among peoples and materials.

This study explored 17 bilingual teacher candidates' (bilingual TCs) representations of their lived experience of language via linguistic portraits. Specifically, attention was paid to the semiotic elements (space, place, time, and the body) these bilingual TCs employed and the ways this assemblage of elements formed raciolinguistic chronotopes. Analysis demonstrates that raciolinguistic chronotopes enabled bilingual TCs to portray their experiences of racialization as Spanish-English bilinguals in the United States. Analysis also shows the ways these TCs often vacillate between adhering to and challenging raciolinguistic ideologies. Findings have implications for how language portraits are utilized as a teacher learning tool in teacher education programs serving bilingual TCs of Latina/o descent.

One of the most vital forms of dialogue for a novice teacher is the inner dialogue of reflective practice. The purpose of this study was to investigate if and how blogging supports the ability of preservice teachers (PSTs) to reflect on their student teaching experience. Findings suggest that blogging may serve as both response and stimuli, providing a structure for interns to consider past and future practice. Perspective taking also seemed prompted by self-questioning. Photos within blog posts may serve as semiotic mediators, offering reflective cues. Furthermore, blogging may offer opportunities for PSTs to process and regulate emotion, important in a profession strained by burnout.

This article explores how seven Swedish digital teaching platforms in mathematics make use of the affordances provided by various modalities and dynamic functions. A model based on social semiotics is used to analyse how dynamic functions are used, whether or not the language is technically oriented, if relational or operational processes are emphasised, and the logic in the text. The analysis focuses on how the dynamic elements in teaching materials are used and potential consequences of their use. The results reveal a tendency to predominantly allocate dynamic and interactive elements to tasks related to theoretical parts and examples, and also that the most common dynamic element, film, has substantial potential to support meaning-making in several respects. For example, a voice-over can easily contribute a personal touch, add further logic to the content, or give an explanation based on an operational process.

Recent work on linguistic landscapes at schools (schoolscapes) has highlighted the complex dialogic relationship between the semiotics of public signage in educational spaces and policies seeking to enforce dominant ideologies. In this paper, we discuss the results of research conducted in the Deep South of Thailand, a minority region in which the predominant language, ethnicity and religion are different from the rest of the nation, and which has over the last century been exposed to significant assimilatory pressure. Drawing on an analysis of language use in two Islamic schools in the region, as well as interviews and focus groups with administrators, teachers and students, we focus on the temporality of meanings - how schoolscapes are anchored in narratives of the past, present and future. Historical memories evoked by particular elements of the schoolscapes are discussed, particularly in light of the efforts of the local population to resist assimilatory policies. We also discuss the aspirations of our participants for the future, observing that, while recent language policy in Thailand has focussed primarily on promoting Thai and English, our participants saw a much more varied plurilingualism as relevant to their lives.

This study reports bilingual international students' communicative strategies to preempt and resolve English as a lingua franca (ELF) miscommunication in an English-medium virtual learning program offered by an international university in times of the global pandemic. Drawing upon 18 hours of Zoom recordings and supplementary ethnographic data, this study follows a spatial orientation [Canagarajah, S. 2018a. "The Unit and Focus of Analysis in Lingua Franca English Interactions: In Search of a Method." "International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism" 21 (7): 805--824. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1474850] to analyze international students' polysemiotic meaning-making practices for virtual communicative effectiveness. Key findings highlight the students' explicitness-raising strategic moves such as indexing and reflexive pointing, repetitive highlighting, visual contrasting mediated by the mouse cursor and screen-based resources while navigating moments of (potential) miscommunication. To remedy and preempt understanding problems, they coordinate and align polysemiotic spatial repertoires across expansive spatiotemporal scales to enhance the clarity of potentially ambiguous referents, communicative topics, and key information. This study advances current understanding of bi/multilinguals' polysemiotic translingual pragmatic ability for communicative success in lingua franca scenarios, and provides implications that help prepare international higher education for effective virtual communication, teaching, and learning in the post-pandemic digital era.

Purpose: Government primary schools in Australia increasingly take up the International Baccalaureate's Primary Years Programme (IB-PYP) to supplement government-mandated curriculum and governance expectations. The purpose of this paper is to explore how teachers navigate and contest dual policy-practice expectations in the Victorian Government IB-PYP context. Design/methodology/approach: This study used a narrative inquiry approach. The narratives of two teachers were generated through a narrative interview and then re-storied with participants through a set of conceptual lenses drawn out of the policy assemblage and affect studies theoretical spaces. Findings: The stories participants told show that competing mandatory local policy expressions are experienced and contested both to stabilize a technocratic rationality and produce alternative critical-political educational futures. Originality/value: There a few accounts of teachers' policy experience in government school settings implementing the IB-PYP. In addressing this gap, this paper directly responds to prior claims of the IB's failure to promote an emancipatory pedagogy, showing instead that when teachers who bring a more critical understanding of educational purpose to their work take up the IB-PYP policy to support the enactment of that purpose.

This qualitative study investigated the impact of online education on the learning and peer interaction experiences of students from eight universities in Hong Kong over the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. It employed an expansive and spatial notion of translanguaging to explore the process by which students drew on the affordance of virtual communication environments to communicate, study and develop new identities. The findings suggested (1) the students strategically mobilised manifold multimodal resources to constitute their communicative repertoires that facilitated smooth intercultural communication and academic success; (2) such communicative competence centralized the mediating effect of digital semiotic systems and thus might empower the students with disadvantaged language skills; and (3) through translanguaging acts the students developed a virtually translocal identity with an expanded experience of internationalisation of higher education whereby the increasingly interwoven physical and virtual spaces bring extended social networks, learning resources, and career opportunities. The implications of the findings were discussed.

Drawing on interviews with staff from Language Supplementary Schools (LSS) in Manchester (UK), we discuss the emergence of makeshift ideologies whereby actors seek to legitimise choices and policies of heritage language transmission in the diaspora setting. Actors discuss the use of regional and vernacular varieties, the consideration given to pupils' multilingual repertoires, and the use of the majority language (English) as 'scaffold'. Conscious that such practices potentially clash with the schools' expected mission statements and prevailing ideological dispositions, actors seek to justify them. They do this with reference to changes in setting and attitudes, which they position along time and place axes, comparing origin countries with the diaspora reality, thereby forging new language narratives as a 'diasporic stance'. We consider the discursive tools and actions of talks that constitute descriptions, explanations, justifications, and their interplay in actors' efforts to share their perspective on practices and the attitudes that accompany them. The study shows how ideologies regarding the particular diasporic situation are shifting, and the relevance of pluralistic language repertoires within it. Methodologically, the study suggests that ideologies are not just discursive dimensions, rather they are constructed and communicated discursively, allowing us to trace their emergence using semiotic and discourse-analytical tools.

How we talk about bilingualism has an effect on how others think about bilingual individuals, and in turn, how "active bilingual learners/users of English" (ABLE) students are assessed and taught in schools. I use a transdisciplinary approach of bridging social semiotics, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive linguistics to explain how code-switching is metaphor, an external perspective of bilingualism as inter-domain linguistic mapping and translanguaging is metonymy, an internal perspective of intra-domain linguistic mapping. By placing translanguaging/metonymy on the syntagmatic axis and code-switching/metaphor on the paradigmatic axis, I demonstrate through example sentences of monolingual and bilingual speech and figures, how accepting the inaccurate metaphor of bilingualism as just code-switching alone, sets in motion countless dichotomies that act to create the bilingualism-as-problem orientation for ABLE students in U.S. schools; most specifically for those at the intersection of bilingualism and disability. A transdisciplinary view of bilingualism includes both an internal perspective (translanguaging, metonymic combination of parts of the whole linguistic repertoire on the syntagmatic axis), plus an external perspective (code-switching, metaphoric alternation of linguistic features from diverse named languages on the paradigmatic axis). I conclude with implications for a more appropriate description of bilingualism and its role in education.

Children and adults are frequently engaging in shared reading activities and storytelling within early childhood settings. This includes children with varying abilities and intersecting identities learning in inclusive or special education settings. Researchers recognize the importance of representation in children's stories, and stories that reflect young readers, their families, and broader community (Bishop, 1990; Bishop, 2012; Oxley, 2006). However, minimal empirical evidence of disability representation in children's literature exists (Tondreau & Rabinowitz, 2021). Thus, this empirical study investigates favorite classroom picturebooks in active early childhood special education (ECSE) classrooms. The study aimed to gain insight about the frequency and quality of inclusive literature, by investigating disability representation in active ECSE classrooms. The research surveyed active ECSE teachers to generate a data corpus of 50 unique favorite classroom stories. Using qualitative semiotic analysis, the study analyzed the texts and visuals for elements of inclusion, to discern elements of inclusion within each story. Within the data corpus, 7 out of 50 favorite stories included disabled and non-disabled characters. This analysis highlighted the absence of disability within the data set, and variations between strong, some, and limited disability representation. The data suggests a need to increase young children's exposure to inclusive stories and strength-based representations of disability.

The current Finnish core curriculum requires all teachers in basic education to be linguistically responsive. However, studies on the linguistically responsive practices used by teachers are scarce. The frequency with which teachers (N = 820) use 21 linguistically responsive practices was investigated through data that were gathered via an online survey. Based on factor analysis, teachers' practices formed four categories: identifying language demands, linguistic scaffolding, explicit attention to language, and additional semiotic systems scaffolding. Teachers reported using the latter the most. Of teachers' background factors, teaching experience of 2-5 years was linked to more frequent use of students' interests to plan teaching compared to 0-2 or more than 10 years of experience. The results point out a need for more training in linguistically responsive teaching practices for in-service teachers, as experience is not linked to growth trajectories.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the practice of intertextuality of Farah (pseudonym) a 20-year-old female university student who engaged in a variety of culturally shaped digital literacy practices. In particular, it seeks to elucidate how Farah's practice of intertextuality serves as a semiotic mediation for her exercise and enactment of agency and identity during her everyday literacy practice on Instagram. This research was framed as a case study design with a connective ethnography approach specifically suited to the online environment and digital communication where the researcher's physical presence as an observer is no longer required. Data were collected by means of digital media and technology such as WhatsApp Message Service, informal phone interviews, and online observation. The collected data comprised online snapshots of quote bots, pictures, drawings and comments that Farah produced and shared as part of her everyday digital literacy practice. The data analysis entailed examination of Farah's practice of intertextuality through the lens of sociocultural perspective on text production and interpretation. The findings revealed that Farah's use of quote bots and doodles posted on Instagram involved the act of borrowing texts from other sources as well as mixing English with Indonesian language. Farah's practice of intertextuality was pre-mediated, calculated and purposeful, allowing her to engage in digital authorship involving creativity, improvisation and consciousness as ingredients of agency. In the same vein, Farah's practice of intertextuality allowed her to author the self as a contemplative religious individual. The research concluded with an appeal to policy makers and educational practitioners to respond to the learners' changing learning landscape by re-defining the way we view learners/students, from merely a recipient of knowledge to an individual who has agency, identity and funds of knowledge that have to be acknowledged and appreciated in any process of curriculum design and its implementation on a daily basis.

This exploratory study focuses on changes in the accomplishment of requests by an adult English as an additional language speaker/ learner interacting on WhatsApp for nine months. The analysis follows a microanalytic approach to digital interaction informed by recent developments within longitudinal conversation analysis. It unpacks the array of semiotic and interactional resources that the focal learner employs to make class-related requests to the teacher. Longitudinal comparison of four request sequences over time suggests that the differences in how the requesting posts are designed and responded to index both increased interactional competence to accomplish requests in English on WhatsApp as well as evolving socio-interactional ties between the learner and the teacher. Despite the popularity of text chats, only a handful of studies have investigated how the practices employed by additional language learners to engage in text chat interaction change over time and this work has not focused on naturally occurring interactions. The present study thereby contributes new understandings to text chat interaction with additional language speakers and to longitudinal research on interactional competence development in online settings.

This study reports on a case study about multimodal work in a primary physics classroom focusing on forces. Previous research reports that students benefit from multimodal work in science classrooms. Yet, few systematic studies have been performed to reveal how students represent their experiences and ideas of science phenomena over time within and across different semiotic modes (e.g., through action, speech, writing, and image, including multimodal ensembles). The design of the lessons was built around a number of experimental activities, starting with a puzzling phenomenon and where students for each experiment predicted, observed, described, and tried to come up with explanations. Based on social-semiotics, we combined analysis at an overall level (long timescale and large grain size) and a detailed level (short timescale and small grain size) to shed light on how the science content was represented within and between modes over the teaching and learning period, and what content was expressed in these representations. Our findings reveal how students moved from focusing on attributes such as a "heavy" regarding artifacts used in the experiments, towards the central physics processes, such as one object exerting force on another object. Furthermore, we were able to detect that such "signs of learning" were shown in students' small-group discussions and multimodal texts following a carefully orchestrated multimodal exposition by the teacher. Hence, such a careful multimodal orchestration appeared to be critical for the students' meaning-making about the science content.

Effective arts learning requires the development of important literacies. While investigation of discipline-specific literacies has filtered the literature, it is unclear if these literacies are acknowledged, understood, and/or taught. In this paper, we share the classroom discourse of two arts teachers in early and middle years across visual art and music--to determine how discipline-specific literacies are used and taught. Findings show that these teachers intuitively and consistently share age-appropriate arts-literacies and use semiotic metalanguage with their students to express and make meaning through arts practices. With contemporary research in the field of literacy consistently acknowledging the diverse ways we communicate and the importance of creative thinking and aesthetic-artistic reasoning, it is critical that classroom data, such as shared in this paper, is considered for future curriculum development. We conclude by recommending strategies and considerations for arts teachers when planning and implementing arts literacies to improve students' applied understanding.

This study explores how hard of hearing students decided whether the shape was a polygon and which semiotic sources were used when the students engaged in explaining geometrical concepts. It was defined how the students interacted with geometric shapes using semiotic sources and examined how such multimodal interactions with geometric figures displayed their reasoning. The study was a case study and carried out three hard of hearing students. The data was collected through interviews and analyzed with content analysis. It was detected that the students paid attention to edge, angle, and vertex of the shapes in the process of identifying polygon. It was seen that the students used gesture, speech, sign language, inscriptions which are semiotic sources and personal or mathematical definitions to express polygon concept. However, it has been determined that students have some misconceptions in the process of explaining concepts. It is suggested that the words used in the concept definition should be selected carefully by the teachers to teach the concepts correctly and the teachers use hand signs for concepts in their lesson.

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 dismantle simplified, binary thinking about race. CMW encourages semiotic analyses of antiracist discourse and examines messages along continuums that emphasize complexities and intersections of race, language, and culture. We share how language teachers at two urban colleges that serve immigrant populations integrate CMW into their classes, and we discuss the effectiveness of this pedagogy in terms of language learning and antiracist education. We maintain that language teaching and social justice education can support each other and that media literacy provides a meaningful and effective foundation for engaged antiracist pedagogy.

With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly all theoretical and practical classes and methods of assessment had to be delivered on digital platforms. This paper reports the use of task-based assessment of the communicative competence of first-year pre-service English language teachers. The aim was to explore the role of the platform where the tasks were held on the students' self-assessment of their spoken performances. The participants (n=50) evaluated their linguistic, discourse, strategic and sociolinguistics competence on two public speaking tasks. The face-to-face speaking task required elaborating on two famous quotes, whereas the online speaking task had to do with the semiotic analysis of a TV commercial which was decided upon by the teacher candidate. Student evaluations of their communicative competence ranged on a scale from one to five, where one meant very poor and five meant very good. The results indicated that the only component of communicative competence that was viewed to be good was discourse competence in the face-to-face task; however, all the elements of communicative competence were considered to be good except for the sociolinguistic competence in the face-to-screen task. The main findings were (i) that the students had a more positive evaluation of their communicative competence when making online presentations and (ii) that they mostly attributed the differences in their self-evaluations either to the platform or to a combination of the platform and the nature of the task. Yet, face-to-face interaction seems to act as a requirement to improve the sociolinguistic competence of foreign language teacher candidates.

Artichoke's "Temple" artwork illustrates the most positive aspects of what in this essay is called "spectacle"--community integration, healing, equal access to public space, and artistic expression. Indeed, there are many kinds of spectacles, from the example set by the "Temple" to promote tolerance and recognition of a community's shared humanity beyond ideologies, to the Nazi Olympic Games of 1936, whose purpose was to mask Germany's growing militarism and antisemitism (Byrne 107-22). Without a doubt, the cultural impact of spectacle in human life is massive. Spectacle was feared by the puritans and used to indoctrinate by Catholics during the Counter-Reformation. It can serve as a recreational relief valve, a spiritual celebration, a channel for artistic expression, and a political mobilization tool. In fact, spectacle has influenced people's daily lives from the beginning of time even more than the other way around. For all these reasons, teaching spectacle as an academic subject is vital to building a critical understanding among students of the ways in which spectacle--consciously and unconsciously--shapes our world.

The purpose of this article is to examine how signifiers and empty signifiers may contribute to the mainstreaming of environmental and sustainability education in teacher education. We argue that the moniker of environmental and sustainability education is an empty signifier in that it fails to convey meaning about what it signifies. Tracing the history of the pre-sustainability, sustainability, and post-sustainability field signifiers, and their respective subfield signifiers (e.g., environmental education and education for sustainable development), we conduct a philosophical inquiry, augmented by a modified form of semiotic analysis, to expose the degree to which these signifiers are empty. The limitations and benefits of empty signification are explored through philosophical interpretation. Implications of empty signifier limitations are considered in teacher education and the manner in which they may contribute to the unsuccessful mainstreaming of environmental and sustainability education in teacher education. We conclude that a core or compulsory environmental and sustainability education course should be mandated in teacher education to ensure that all teacher candidates receive the education they require to educate future generations of children to live well on Earth.

This action research examined the process of integrating students' out-of-school digital literacy into a second language composition class and the role of social mediation in developing learner agency. It involved EFL students with pre-basic and basic proficiency (pre-A1 to A1-A2 on the CEFR level) in a Saudi Arabian university. Using socially mediated view of literacy and learner agency as a theoretical framework, this study reveals the complex ways in which the students composed multimodal texts while relying on their agency to utilize the digital tools. Data sources include interviews with the students, teacher-researcher reflections, and the students' multimodal texts. The data reveal that through three distinct bridging practices, the students skillfully navigated through different reading sources and digital tools when they composed their multimodal texts ("technological bridging"), thus affording the opportunities for them to express themselves authentically ("identity bridging") and to engage with the text that they composed meaningfully ("semiotic bridging"). However, there was a trade-off in terms of the teacher's role in facilitating learner agency and linguistic accuracy. Focus on content lowered the bar on acceptable grammar mistakes. This insight corroborates existing literature on the need for a balanced pedagogical focus on content and accuracy in multimodal composition. This study has implications for teachers who wish to reimagine EFL composition by connecting it to students' literacy practices, particularly to those with pre-basic and basic proficiency.

This paper focuses on the actions of learners on digital and analogue materials while dealing with a statistical problem. To investigate the learners' actions, a semiotic perspective of mathematical learning according to C. S. Peirce is used, since in this perspective learning mathematics is described as visible activities on diagrams. Through a qualitative semiotic analysis of the actions of two third-graders working with given data, the statistical diagram interpretations of the learners can be reconstructed. A comparison of the reconstructed diagram interpretations reveals whether different movements lead to similar diagram interpretations. In addition, it is of interest whether the diagram interpretations are the same when acting on digital and analogue diagrams because the same mathematical relationships have to be observed. Through this comparison, conclusions can be drawn about the similarities and differences in working with digital and analogue materials and how these materials may be used profitably in statistical learning.

Creative pedagogies contribute significantly to children's cognitive, social and linguistic development. This article discusses the drama-based creative literacy practice of an early primary teacher in a high diversity school in Sydney, Australia. Literacy pedagogy blended with drama and role play was shown to aid oracy whilst also adding valuable semiotic support for language learners. Video recordings of this teacher's lessons formed the basis of a hermeneutic phenomenological study into the affordances of drama in additional language contexts. Findings revealed positive contributions to learner comprehension and engagement. They also indicated that the pressure of an over-crowded curriculum necessitates personal commitment to creative arts pedagogy on the part of the teacher. Despite policy rhetoric promoting creativity as a key capability, creativity itself is seen to be stymied in an educational context heavily prioritising standardisation and assessment. Without systemic support, it is left to motivated, individual teachers to prioritise creative learning experiences in schools.

Gunther Kress's multimodal and social semiotic theory of communication has moved beyond the realm of linguistics, which originally framed his work, and has reached out to inform other fields, such as those of education, museum studies, as well as the humanities and social sciences more broadly. This article brings together our insights in relation to a concept from Gunther Kress's theory, that of "design." Drawing from our research, we reflect on Kress's conceptualisation of design in social semiotics and discuss how this idea has inspired us to advance research across the domains of formal learning in schools, informal learning and communication in museums, and in everyday communication and social interaction. We consider that the contribution of design is to challenge the boundaries of concepts such as 'competence', 'interpretation' and 'critique', associated respectively with the dominant discourses and practices in the worlds of education, museums and everyday communication and research practice. We look at design as: (1) learning; (2) transformation of resources; and (3) an engaged and engaging social semiotic research, and argue that as an interpretative resource it enables us to move beyond the limitations posed by institutions such as schools, museums and academia.

This study aims to explore the political cartoons that highlight the displacement of Palestinians in the village of Sheikh Jarrah. It investigates the way this discourse is portrayed as well as the predominant themes of these cartoons. The data of this study consists of eight political cartoons drawn from Palestinian online newspapers from May to July 2021, featuring the displacement issue of Sheik Jarrah by well-known local cartoonists. Multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) in which language analysis is combined with the analysis of other semiotic resources including colors, gestures, images, etc. for interpreting meaning (O'Halloran et al., 2011), is adopted for the analysis. Visual Social Semiotics of Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) is also used as a linguistic framework. The study asserts that understanding the three different aspects of the visual compositions, namely, representational, interactive and compositional, that serve as a semiotic mode of communication, is essential for conveying the intended message of the visual compositions. The study also identifies the predominant themes or messages of the selected cartoons, which mainly focus on two main points: (i) the tyranny and oppression of Israel over Palestinians through eradication and displacement; and (ii) the Palestinians' struggle, steadfastness and resistance in the event of Israel's forced displacement.

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 teaching critical viewing (Lim and Tan, 2017, Lim, 2018), MLEFL aims at involving student teachers (STs) in a transformative process through which STs with no previous instruction on multimodality are introduced to multimodal literacy. After being engaged in making meaning through various semiotic resources and conducting multimodal analysis with the use of a pedagogic metalanguage, STs complete a task of representing their new experiences via the process of creating a lesson plan aimed at promoting primary school students' multimodal literacy. The paper presents MLEFL as a design for learning (Kress and Selander, 2012). It serves two purposes: to present the content and syllabus of the MLEFL workshop and to reflect upon its implementation and effectiveness. The paper reports on the qualitative findings from a small-scale research conducted with twenty pre-service EFL teachers who participated in the fourweek workshop in a virtual environment. It investigates STs' perceptions shared in workshop evaluation forms and participation in the forum as well as their assignments for signs of learning. The analysis of the findings revealed differences in STs' capacities (Kress, 2010: 175) which support the effectiveness of the workshop. Most STs created lesson plans which promote critical viewing, used the pedagogic metalanguage efficiently and explained the design of their activities with well-informed rationale.

This paper outlines the general influence of Halliday's (1994, 2014) systemic functional linguistics on TESOL curriculum. Halliday's explanation of language as a social semiotic and language learning as learning to mean has been applied internationally in genre and textbased teaching. The concept of register in systemic functional linguistics describes linguistic variation of texts for the expression of different meanings. SFL studies document teachers' explicit instruction in the lexicogrammatical construction of text types linked to function and social context. The explicitness informs students' decision-making for formulation of meanings in different text types. Reference is made to SFL applied in teacher education. There is mention of the relevance of SFL to Australia's concern with literacy standards in education.

Children's cartoons and films are often dubbed for obvious reasons that children find reading subtitles a challenging process in a film. This study investigated the issue of Otherness and the strategies of its audiovisual translation in the Arabic dubbed version of "Masha and the Bear," a Russian cartoon film. The study examined the orientation of three elements of Audiovisual Translation (AVT): the verbal, the para-verbal and the non-verbal. In the context of Masha and the Bear, the comparative analysis of selected dubbed episodes confirmed the three orientations and showed that the strategies most often used by the translator are paraphrase, substitution, and generalization. The results of the study suggest that the challenge mainly lies in the dilemma of meeting the audience's expectations without altering deeply the specificity of the Source Text (ST). They also show that in most cases the translator domesticated the SL product to meet the cultural values of the audience. This study also uncovered a few challenges posed by the rendering of otherness represented in cartoons, and accordingly understood how the translator coped with this aspect in the given multiple semiotic systems interacting in the cartoons. As cartoons play a major role in children's life and education, this study would develop increasing interests in translation of cartoons through dubbing and promote the local culture and ensure a higher degree of acceptability by the target viewer.

This article addresses key theoretical and practical concerns related to the intercultural encounter with multimodal literature. Previous efforts to incorporate an intercultural dimension into conceptualisations of literary literacy have primarily focused on competences associated with the reading of traditional, script-based texts. However, as the term "literature" is today associated with a wide range of new media texts, there is a need to take this into account in theoretical constructs as well as in pedagogical practice. The article provides insight into how the multimodal elements of "film" function as a complex meaning-making ensemble which adds layers of potential insight as well as potential misunderstanding to the text interpretation process. With a basis in the Model of the Intercultural Reader (Hoff, 2016), the article sheds light on how issues related to the narrative style and structure of a Hollywood motion picture can be navigated through an exploration of the recognisable audio-visual rhetoric of oft-repeated tropes. Drawing on Baz Luhrmann's film "Romeo + Juliet" as a practical example, concrete suggestions for pedagogical practice are offered. By integrating practices of script-based intercultural reading with new literacies, the article expands upon previous theorisations of the intercultural reader and provides insight into how teachers may facilitate nuanced intercultural explorations of literary multimodal texts in the 21st century language classroom.

Online learning has gained increasing attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers face social exigencies to design ways of knowledge dissemination in online instruction. We posit that understanding how knowledge can be represented in successful online academic genres can inform teachers on how they can design students' online learning experiences. This study examined how scientific knowledge is disseminated in one of the most widespread academic genres, TED Talks, which share discoursal similarities with other academic genres such as online lectures. This study adopted a systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis approach to explore how a presenter used speech, images, and gestures to disseminate knowledge. The analysis shows that a presenter orchestrates speech, images, and gestures strategically to clarify the scientific ideas and engage the audience. Based on understanding how the three semiotic modes are used to disseminate scientific knowledge in accessible and engaging ways, this paper discusses how insights on multimodal orchestration can function as a heuristic tool to inform design in online learning.

Globally, the use of visuo-semiotic models (VSMs) in the mathematics classroom is called for across levels and topics. Literature confirms that visual cognition/literacy in teachers is limited and that their capabilities in visual representation is low. The aim of this study was therefore to explore pre-service teachers' (PSTs) conception of VSMs as a process in doing mathematics in the context of coordinate geometry. A survey with qualitative data was used to collect data from mathematics pre-service teachers taking the geometry module. The PSTs answered open ended questions that comprised coordinate geometry test items. Mnguni's (2014) cognitive process of visualisation was used to analyse visualisation skills portrayed in the test. The study found that different pre-service teachers operate at different levels of visual literacy. The teacher education curriculum should therefore be systematically designed to cater for the skills lacking in the PSTs. It is also recommended that teacher training programmes sharpen their attention on bringing awareness of mathematical visual literacy among PSTs during training.

While much existing literature has shed light on the linguistic experience of Asian international students (ISs) in Anglophone contexts where English is the primary language for academic learning as well as for their social life outside the classroom, little research has explored Asian ISs' English use in a non-Anglophone context where both English and the local language are advocated as the academic lingua franca. Informed by the recent theoretical evolution of English as a lingua franca (ELF), which foregrounds the multilingual nature of communication in a super-diverse world (Jenkins, 2015), this research examines ISs' experience of using English as a multilingua franca (EMF) in their social and academic interaction at an internationalized university in Taiwan--a non-Anglophone country where English is frequently, but not always, used as the contact language. Drawing from a qualitative methodology, data were collected through background questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with four ISs and were analyzed inductively to map out the ISs' EMF interaction with their peer students and university faculty. The analysis shows that these ISs were able to creatively utilize their multilingual and multimodal repertoire to achieve mutual understanding and comity. Furthermore, they manifested an intercultural awareness in their EMF communication as they were able to strategically manage their language use to accommodate their interactants' language proficiency, personal backgrounds, and ideologies. These findings invite TESOL educators to expand learners' communicative repertoire and cultivate multi-semiotic language users to facilitate the interaction of the diverse student demographics brought by the internationalization of higher education.

This research aimed to analyze Algebra unit in both the old and new Palestinian curriculum for the ninth grade by using deductive content analysis based on the social semiotic approach. The results of this study showed that, in both books, the mental, behavioral, and verbal processes were more frequent than the relational, existential, and material processes. Moreover, the most frequent object used in both curriculums were the initial description, the rule, and the official definition. The most frequent representation of the mathematical object in both curriculums, was the algebraic representation, then the verbal, the numerical and the graphic representations. The research findings also indicate that in both books, the use of the pronoun "I" was the most frequent, then the pronoun "we" and then other pronouns. The imperative was frequent in the Algebra unit in the old curriculum, but less frequent in the new curriculum. The research findings, regarding the textual function in both books, indicated that the text orientation 'previous knowledge to new knowledge' was the most frequent in Algebra. This demonstrates that the author in both books cared about applying the new knowledge and assessing it, what means that the text progresses horizontally in both curriculums.

In this theoretical essay, we find inspiration in Lotman's semiotics, in Morìn's sociology of education, the studies of cultural psychology and psychoanalysis of Valsiner and De Luca Picione, and other cultural stimuli coming from the didactics of mathematics. The notion of boundary and liminality was developed and discussed to grasp a relationship between some psychological processes and some transformative aspects of educational processes. Our idea is that an interdisciplinarity education could help orient disciplinary resources towards common educational goals and acquire the skills necessary for each student to be a citizen of the glocal community.