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This paper describes and examines students' shared construction of meanings while learning about quadratic functions via digital artifacts that simulate real-world phenomena, like the motion of a ball on an inclined plane, focusing specifically on the role of the teacher in that construction process. The study follows the interactions of twenty 15-year-old students and their teacher during the completion of three sequential digital tasks, analyzing how these interactions promote the students' ability to construct the mathematical meanings of the quadratic function. The study was guided by the theory of semiotic mediation, which treats artifacts as fundamental to cognition and views learning as the evolution from meanings connected to the use of a certain artifact to those recognizable as mathematical. The data analysis showed students progressing from the description of the real-world phenomenon toward a construction of the meaning of the quadratic function that models the phenomenon. While marking the "critical moments" in this progress, we analyze the communication strategies used by the teacher to facilitate it. Our research findings showed evidence that certain types of questions and the strategy "re-voicing" can be particularly effective in prompting students' construction of mathematical meanings.

Semiotics is the study of symbols and the creation of their meaning through social interactions. In this paper, we explore more deeply the socially situated nature of semiotics by extending current semiotics theories and frameworks from the perspective of emergent modeling. The first expansion is to replace the interpretant (meaning associated with symbols) with a construct that comes from social constructivism, namely taken-as-shared mathematical ideas. The second involves integrating purpose into semiotic frameworks. Finally, we broaden the time span that is typical for semiotic analyses to account for 5 weeks of collective activity and describe an argumentation analytic technique for doing so. We do all of this from the point of view of instructional designers who use realistic mathematics education and consider emergent modeling as a lynchpin of instruction.

This study investigates the ways in which first graders utilised a variety of semiotic resources when authoring nonfiction compositions during a nonfiction genre writing unit of study. Grounded in social semiotics and multimodality theories, the study uses a case study approach to explore the text, image and design resources used in students' multimodal compositions as a group followed by an in-depth examination of two students' compositions. The data collection includes student compositions, video of classroom interactions and video recorded student composition/artefact elicitation interviews in which students discussed their composition process, authorial decision making and final composition. A multimodal approach to data analysis examines the semiotic resources used by the children, their meaning potential and purposes for inclusion in their nonfiction compositions. Findings suggest students drew upon a range of modalities, including visual images, graphic design features and movable text, in addition to written language to share their ideas and present their information through multimodal compositions. Implications include a need for curricular and instructional advancements with a greater focus on multimodal composing techniques to create inclusive spaces where students can more fully represent what they want to communicate.

Engagement with songs through performance and analysis is a key component of music curricula worldwide. Music learning has a significant impact on a number of student competencies, including enhancing students' communicative abilities as they learn to manipulate, express, and share sound in both voice qualities and lyrics. However, common analyses of singing performance rarely focus exclusively on voice quality, and there is no systematic framework which considers how emotional meaning in lyrics interacts with emotional meaning in voice quality. Drawing on systemic functional semiotics, this article proposes a unified theoretical framework for examining how emotional meaning is co-constructed in the voice and lyrics in singing performance. This framework provides a novel approach for discussing and teaching song analysis and performance. The framework will be illustrated through the analysis of the interaction between voice quality and lyrics in the song "Someone Like You" performed by Adele.

Drama provides an opportunity for students to use their imagination to express themselves verbally and with body language and is concerned with the world of 'let's pretend'. It has been widely used to foster language skills in foreign language teaching and engages both students and the teachers affectively and cognitively. Apart from its motivational aspect, drama enhances students' socio-semiotic capabilities by enabling them to engage with various modes simultaneously. Considering the wide range of contributions of drama, its integration into foreign language teaching curriculum and investigating ELT pre-service teachers' (PSTs) views on this integration seem highly valuable. Therefore, the aim of this qualitative study is to find out the perceptions of junior ELT PSTs on using drama in English Language Teaching and on their practices in a drama course. The study included twentyeight junior ELT PSTs studying at a state school in Turkey. The participants were enrolled in "Drama in ELT" course in 2018, fall. This research adopted a Grounded Theory study design. Data were collected through an open-ended questionnaire and a semi-structured focus group interview with randomly chosen five participants in order to find out the participants' views on drama and their "Drama in ELT" course. The results revealed that ELT PSTs find Drama course useful for their professional development. Furthermore, they indicated positive feelings during the "Drama in ELT" course and the participants mostly stated that they will use drama as a part of their future English lessons. Therefore, drama courses offered by ELT curriculum has been found to contribute to ELT PSTs' academic development as well as professional development by freeing them from the conventional classroom environment and giving them opportunity to benefit from their own experiences and imagination. [This paper was presented at the Cukurova International ELT Teachers Conferences (CUELT) 2019.]

Facilitating collaborative creativity among children involves offering material resources that support collaborative and creative interactions. Popular views of tablets, such as the iPad, suggest that they are better suited to solitary game-playing or video-watching than to collaborative open-ended tasks. I explore this further through a social semiotic lens, applying the concepts of 'semiotic resources' and 'affordances' to develop a more nuanced understanding of what tablets have to offer in relation to children's collaborative creativity. Through this lens, I compare observations of six pairs of 5-6-year-old children engaged in a collaborative drawing task completed either on paper or on the iPad. I apply a thematic analysis to the children's dialogue across 25 episodes (15 iPad, 10 paper) and the visual dimensions of their 41 drawings (23 iPad, 18 paper), and develop three interwoven themes: 1) attitudes to space, 2) momentum of the line and 3) pathways to representation. For each of these themes, I explore how the affordances of the iPad and/or the particular application feed into these aspects of the drawing process and the implications of this for children's collaborative creativity. The analysis suggests that drawing on the iPad can be more responsive and less subject to personal planning than drawing on paper. I suggest that this difference is shaped by physical properties such as the touch-screen interface, but also emerges as a result of the cultural investment in drawing on paper as a form of 'self-expression', a notion that works to limit exploratory and collaborative engagement with the resources. Since participants were noticeably open to exploring new ideas together while drawing on the iPad, I argue that we need to reassess the potentials of touch-screen tablets to support tasks of collaborative creativity in educational contexts.

The objective of this qualitative research is to study the mathematical work when solving a mathematical task in the domain of probability presented by Chilean high school mathematics teachers in pre-service and in-service training. We consider as theoretical support the Mathematical Working Space model and methodological design of a collective case study, comprising of five teachers in pre-service training and eight teachers in in-service training. This research design allows us to analyze mathematical objects under semiotic, instrumental, and discursive dimensions, identifying privileged vertical planes, the paradigm applied, and the different strategies used by teachers. The task presented to the participants allows two different correct answers depending on the interpretation of the random experiment in question. Since the definition of the random experiment involved in the task is of utmost importance, according to our results, this notion was not evident in all the productions analyzed, which issue poses a challenge for the teaching and learning of probability.

In this article we present the results of a biology teaching module offered at university bachelor level for law students and social sciences students in Lima, Peru. The objective was to trigger philosophical reflection on the notion of nature (cognitive dimension) and to assess if and to what extent the use of poetry contributes to the students' understanding of nature by adding emotional and conative (desire for action) dimensions. We accounted three dialectical moments of natural sciences and nature poetry in history and discussed their meaning in the context of biology teaching nowadays. We also highlighted the importance of poems as semiotic resources for science learning and explored bibliographic accounts of similar studies. Our results indicate that nature poetry fosters a holistic view of nature, allowing students to combine knowledge with value concerns, and cognitive with conative and emotional dimensions. Also, poetry allows them to connect or confront scientific information with traditional indigenous knowledge. Finally, we found that poetry afforded students a sense of freedom to present and discuss their personal experiences with nature. We concluded that this module can be used as a supplementary educational tool in biology courses and those meant to inspire action and reflection in the face of global environmental challenges.

The purpose of this study was to analyse Italian high school and university students' attitudes towards physics using the Semiotic Cultural Psychological Theory (SCPT). In the SCPT framework, attitudes represent how individuals interpret their experience through the mediation of "generalized meaning" with which they are identified. A view-of-physics questionnaire was used as an instrument to collect data with 1603 high school and university students. Data were analysed through multiple correspondence analysis and cluster analysis. We identified four "generalized meanings" of physics: (a) interesting and important for society; (b) a quite interesting, but badly taught subject at school and not completely useful for society; (c) difficult to study and irrelevant for society; and (d) a fascinating and protective niche from society. The identified generalized meanings are significantly correlated to the choice to study physics at undergraduate level and to the choice of attending physics-related activities in high school. Implications for research are discussed.

The theorization of multimodality in academic scholarship is disconnected from how it is conceptualized by children. To bridge this gap, we analyzed 75 interviews with children about their digital video making. Analysis of their responses demonstrates children's socially-embedded, age-specific understandings of how modes operate, as well as when and why to employ them. In many cases, children's ideas ran counter to formal semiotic grammars and metalanguages of design. Bridging Systemic Functional Linguistics and social semiotics approaches with work in transliteracies, we argue for the need to advance age-centric social semiotic theories that center children's voices, purposes, and capacity to generate theory.

Translanguaging has opened up spaces to recognize the dynamic multilingualism of students in classrooms taught in dominant languages, and problematized concepts such as 'additive bilingualism'. This article aims to further explore two issues that remain little understood. First, translanguaging is often seen as simply the acknowledgement or use of multilingual students' 'first language'. This article clarifies that this is a misunderstanding, for the trans- in translanguaging connotes the transcendence of named languages, the going beyond named languages as have been socially constructed. Second, in going beyond named languages, translanguaging is also intended as a decolonizing project, revealing how bilinguals inhabit a world with different knowledge bases and linguistic/cultural practices. We use two bilingual students, in London and New York City respectively, to show how they are viewed and listened to by their teachers as bilinguals with two 'incomplete' linguistic systems because each element in their language/semiotic repertoire is seen as a separate entity. We then weave all the elements together to provide a fuller picture of these students. In doing so, we reject raciolinguistic ideologies that have enregistered them as deficient and instead regard them through a translanguaging lens. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding translanguaging as a unitary repertoire, as well as its decolonial potential in education as teachers abandon the focus on named standardized languages and engage fully with their students' full repertoire of features and meanings.

Arising in Europe in the early 1990s, content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has become a popular educational approach. CLIL involves a dual focus on content and language learning with an additional language used as the medium of instruction. Although CLIL has received much attention and spread widely around the world, there is limited discussion that critically examines CLIL in relation to its core construct of integration between content and language learning. In particular, the phrasing of 'content and language integrated learning' gestures towards viewing language and content as separate entities. With these fundamental issues in mind, we discuss ways in which translanguaging pedagogies can provide a fruitful direction towards a critical integration of content and language learning in multilingual settings. With a view to contributing to a dynamic integration of content and language learning, we argue that CLIL pedagogies informed by translanguaging allow fluidity in meaning-making practices and critically re-examine the construct of language in CLIL. This approach responds to recent calls for more critical approaches to CLIL in order to challenge 'English-only'/target-language-only pedagogies, 'native-(English-)speakerism', and unequal power relations between content and language teachers in many CLIL programs. Implications of this approach to CLIL classrooms in diverse settings are also discussed.

This paper reports the multimodal resources that attached to students' reasoning in the reinvention of specific geometric linear transformations (like reflections according to the axes, projections onto axes and composition of reflections) in a dynamic geometry environment. Following the design heuristics of Realistic Mathematics Education, we design a task (in R[superscript 2)] referring to specific tools and functions of GeoGebra. Task-based interviews were conducted with a pair of linear algebra students, by way of a computer and a teacher. Data was collected using a video camera observing the students' working environment, screen recorder software, student production and field notes. The data was analysed according to the multimodal paradigm focusing on all semiotic resources, such as gestures and artefact use, in addition to written signs. According to the findings, the artefact use, verbal and written mathematical expressions all interlaced with the emergence of gestures. The students mostly gestured when they faced a new reflection situation and when describing associated geometric actions. Finally, a shared environment with action, production and communication conveyed student reasoning and they managed to reinvent a number of geometric linear transformations.

Considering the contradictions in the structured and static approaches to the nation and national identity observed world-wide and fluid "trans-" approaches to language in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, the paper explores how national identity is constructed and sustained nowadays, specifically in digital spaces both discursively and non-discursively. Based on the notion of 'practice' by Theodore Schatzki (2002), the paper focuses on the translingual practices in relation to national issues and events in Bangladesh drawn from digital spaces through a virtual ethnography. The findings in this paper show that translingual practices and national identity may apparently seem fluid in digital spaces. However, actors nurture beliefs, values, and ideologies in their translingual practices with reference to a territory-based notion of nation, religion, and national identity. Their discursive construction of nation and national identity also seems entangled with a non-discursive bundle of activities and symbolic and material artefacts within material arrangements of spaces. Verbal violence and terrorism accentuating nationalism get immediacy and are concretized in materially mediated semiotized spaces. With an immediate focus on spatial dynamics, while acknowledging the ethos of the post-structuralist approach to language, the paper, hence, indicates the necessity of transgressing the 'logocentrism' in language and identity research in applied linguistics and contributing to the recent development in the post-humanist applied linguistics.

This article engages with the theme of the proposed special issue in a perhaps unexpected way: for me, the 'translinguistic movement' is a pertinent reminder to move beyond the boundaries of language and other visible/audible modalities that are involved in semiosis. It also encourages us to move beyond the naïve empiricism that has shaped sociolinguistic work over the decades. The 'sociolinguistics of the spectre' that I develop in this article is rooted in philosophies of radical empiricism; it acknowledges the sensuous and affective nature of social life, and refuses to work with the 'boundaries, binaries and demarcations' that are located within the temporal 'linearity of modernity' (Garuba, 2013). In doing so, I will look at a particular time-space: the postcolony. It is a time-space where the ghosts of the past are ever-present and shape translinguistic practices; a time-space where time is always somehow 'out-of-joint'.

Research on translingual repertoires has highlighted the diverse semiotic resources that individuals access in communication, but little research has considered how spatial factors permit or limit access to these resources. Furthermore, as translingual studies have predominantly focused on interactional analysis, there is a paucity of studies on how social networks shape the repertoires of users. To fill this gap, we examine the communicative practices of an international spouse temporarily living in the United States. Through interview data and mobility maps, we analyze the participant's subject positioning and its relation to his use of spatial resources in different spaces. Despite the participant's low English proficiency, he engaged in conversations in many spaces through strategic employment of semiotic resources, including multiple languages and material objects. He also adopted certain positionings that afforded him more opportunities to interact. Thus, we argue that the usefulness of semiotic resources is tied to the spaces in which they are employed and that access to these resources is shaped by subject positioning.

Funeral and mourning rites capture so many aspects of the Iranian traditional and religious rituals and provide members of society with cultural tools of lamenting the dead. The study presents socio-cultural considerations in connection with social space and action, linguistic interactions, and semiotic resources of rituals used in mourning ceremonies for Shiite Muslims in the city of Nur, Iran. The paper relies on a mediated discourse analysis approach as a theoretical framework from which to develop a semiotic analysis of the linguistic practices and mediational means that appear in the mourning events. To this end, I shall draw upon video and audio recorded interactions of mourning rituals personally collected at funerals. The paper demonstrates that while mourning rituals are culturally and religiously framed in Shiite Muslims, one must also include the social space, the discourse cycle, the trajectories of the material resource of individual's historical bodies and of text.

While previous studies have outlined the advantages of semiotic resources for meaning making and relationship building, not all semiotic resources are equal in their ability to enhance these features. Using linguistic ethnographic interviews and focus group discussions, this article examines whether mobile phones provide sufficient semiotic resources for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) migrants to effectively communicate, particularly for service situations regarding finances where they often have to speak in English with unknown interlocutors. Two important elements are uncovered regarding EFL migrants' difficulty in using phones as a semiotic resource -- (1) linguistic superiority, where they are judged by their English-speaking interlocutor as engaging in inferior English practices, and (2) paralinguistic insufficiency, where the lack of gestures and facial expressions takes away their ability to make meaning. These elements combined make telephone conversations difficult for many EFL migrants, affecting their expressiveness and ability to effectively communicate, leading to negative outcomes such as avoidance behaviors, and feelings of anxiety and disempowerment. Such difficulties lead to the finding that EFL migrants must be better accommodated when engaging in service transactions, with other, semiotically richer resources required to better aid their understanding and ease feelings of anxiety.

This paper reports from a case study which explores kindergarten children's mathematical abstraction in a teaching--learning activity about reflection symmetry. From a dialectical perspective, abstraction is here conceived as a process, as a genuine part of human activity, where the learner establishes "a point of view from which the concrete can be seen as meaningfully related" (van Oers & Poland "Mathematics Education Research Journal," 19(2), 10-22, 2007, p. 13-14). A cultural-historical semiotic perspective to embodiment is used to explore the characteristics of kindergarten children's mathematical abstraction. In the selected segment, two 5-year-old boys explore the concept of reflection symmetry using a doll pram. In the activity, the two boys first point to concrete features of the sensory manifold, then one of the boys' awareness gradually moves to the imagined and finally to grasping a general and establishing a new point of view. The findings illustrate the essential role of gestures, bodily actions, and rhythm, in conjunction with spoken words, in the two boys' gradual process of grasping a general. The study advances our knowledge about the nature of mathematical abstraction and challenges the traditional view on abstraction as a sort of decontextualised higher order thinking. This study argues that abstraction is not a matter of going from the concrete to the abstract, rather it is an emergent and context-bound process, as a genuine part of children's concrete embodied activities.

This paper argues that meaning-making with multimodal representations in science learning is always contextualized within a genre and, conversely, what constitutes an ongoing genre also depends on a multimodal coordination of speech, gesture, diagrams, symbols, and material objects. In social semiotics, a genre is a culturally evolved way of doing things with language (including non-verbal representations). Genre provides a useful lens to understand how a community's cultural norms and practices shape the use of language in various human activities. Despite this understanding, researchers have seldom considered the role of scientific genres (e.g., experimental account, information report, explanation) to understand how students in science classrooms make meanings as they use and construct multimodal representations. This study is based on an enactment of a drawing-to-learn approach in a primary school classroom in Australia, with data generated from classroom videos and students' artifacts. Using multimodal discourse analysis informed by social semiotics, we analyze how the semantic variations in students' representations correspond to the recurring genres they were enacting. We found a general pattern in the use and creation of representations across different scientific genres that support the theory of a mutual contextualization between genre and representation construction.

Teaching and learning in science disciplines are dependent on multimodal communication. Earlier research implies that students may be challenged when trying to interpret and use different semiotic resources. There have been calls for extensive frameworks that enable analysis of multimodal texts in science education. In this study, we combine analytical tools deriving from social semiotics, including systemic functional linguistics (SFL), where the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions are central. In regard to other modes than writing--and to analyse how textual resources are combined--we build on aspects highlighted in research on multimodality. The aim of this study is to uncover how such a framework can provide researchers and teachers with insights into the ways in which various aspects of the content in multimodal texts are communicated through different semiotic resources. Furthermore, we aim to explore how different text resources interact and, finally, how the students, or authors of teaching resources, position themselves in relation to the subject. Data consist of one student text and one teaching resource text, both comprising drawn and written elements in combination with symbols. Our analyses of the student text suggest that the proposed framework can provide insights into students' content knowledge and, hence, how construction of multimodal texts may be a useful tool for formative assessment. When it comes to teaching resources, the framework may be a useful tool for teachers when choosing resources, particularly in relation to students' possibilities of meaning making when engaging with such texts, but also, as a basis for classroom discussions.

In English-medium instruction (EMI), English-as-a-second-language students will learn all/some subjects through English. Although there are a considerable number of studies which explore classroom interaction in Hong Kong (HK) secondary EMI schools, few studies have investigated EMI lessons which involve South Asian ethnic minorised students. These students share different linguistic and cultural backgrounds and they may not share a common first language with the teacher and other classmates. This study conducts a multimodal conversation analysis of science and mathematics lessons at a HK EMI secondary school, triangulated with interview data, in order to explore how the EMI teacher mobilises various resources to make discipline-specific knowledge accessible and cater for the different needs of all students in the classroom. This study argues that the process of enacting inclusive practices is a process of translanguaging which requires the EMI teacher to mobilise various available multilingual and semiotic resources and draw on what students know collectively for transcending cultural boundaries from the students' everyday culture to cultures of school science and mathematics.

The construction of dynamic multimedia products requires the selection and integration of a range of semiotic resources. As an assessment task for preservice teachers, this construction process is complex but has significant potential for learning. To investigate how weaving together multiple representations in such tasks enables learners to develop conceptual understanding, the paper presents an indicative case study of a 2nd-year preservice primary (K-6) teacher who created a digital explanation on the topic of 'transparency' for stage 3 children (ages 11-12). We focus on data gathered during the 3-h construction process including artefacts such as images, online searches, websites accessed and paper records used for planning; the digital explanation as product; audio and video capture of the construction process and pre- and post-construction interviews. Using multimodal analysis, we examine these data to understand how meanings are negotiated as the maker moves iteratively among multiple representations and through semiotic choices within these representations to explain the science concept. The analyses illustrate the complexity of the construction process while providing insight into the creator's decision-making and to her developing semiotic and conceptual understandings. These findings allow us to build on the concept of cumulative semiotic progression (Hoban & Nielsen, "Research in Science Education," 35, 1101-1119, 2013) by explicating the role of iterative reasoning in the production of pedagogic multimedia.

This classroom-based study aims to contribute knowledge about children's opportunities to make use of drawing to make meaning in science. Employing a social semiotic approach to drawing, we examine what ways of representing science content that are: (1) made available by the teacher; and (2) adopted in children's drawings. We analysed observation data from 11 science lessons in early childhood classrooms (children aged 3 to 8 years), including the drawings that children made during those lessons (129 drawings in total). Our findings suggest that the semiotic resources that teachers provide have a large impact on how children represent science content in their drawings. Moreover, we interpret that teachers strive to support children's 'emergent disciplinary drawing' in science, since they predominantly provided semiotic resources where the science content was generalised and decontextualised. Finally, we propose that 'emergent disciplinary drawing' is incorporated as an element of science pedagogy in ECE practice and ECE teacher education.

There is growing interest in the construct of "transduction", first introduced by (Kress, Cope and Kalantzis (eds), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures pp.153-161, Routledge, 2000), p. 159) to name how meanings in one mode are remade in another. Science educators now broadly agree that students need to learn how to interpret, make, co-ordinate and integrate meanings in multimodal representations of scientific claims. The question of how exactly this transductive capability is enabled, constrained or theorised is receiving renewed attention. In this paper, following a pragmatist socio-cultural perspective, we propose that transduction in science entails creative reasoning enabled by both cognitive and semiotic resources. We claim that that this process entails students achieving both complementarity as well as coherence or consistency of meanings across modes, but is not reducible to mono-modal "translation" of a singular meaning. Because different modes do different work in meaning-making in science, we claim instead that transduction is the process of seeking and recognising both reiteration and complementarity of linguistic and non-linguistic meanings that constitute the nature of concepts and processes in science. While this "content" can be re-represented in verbal shorthand, science meaning-making and discourse are not reducible to this mode. We draw on relevant literature and two indicative examples of student representation construction to support our case. We focus on how students attend to correspondence and coherence requirements to transduce meanings across modes. In our micro-ethnographic analyses of students' collaborative reasoning on the topic of astronomy, we interpret data from multiple video and audio capture. Students use 3D models, 2D representations, gesture and talk as semiotic resources to reason about scientific concepts.

This paper discusses how multimodal creative inquiry might be conceptualised and implemented for children's meaning-making in science. We consider Halliday's (1978) and Vygotsky's (1987, 2016) theoretical ideas for showing how the most important characteristics of social semiotics are connected to imagination, play-based and creative inquiry for children's science meaning-making. Qualitative data was analysed from two preschool classroom video observations of 40 children's playful interactions with technologies, such as robotic toys, semiotic artefacts, two teachers' reflective journal documentation and children's artefacts. Findings show children participate and discuss elements of scientific concepts in inquiry-based dialogues and make sense of science concepts whilst becoming creators of multimodal representations arising from their interests and curiosity. The semiotic resources that operate through technologies such as apps provide a medium for creative inquiry affording communication spaces and multimodal (visual, haptic [digital touch], text) meaning-making around everyday science phenomena. Practical implications lie in upskilling educators' integration of semiotic resources such as robotic toys and deploying a multimodal creative inquiry approach for reconfiguring children's science learning opportunities in early childhood educational practices.

In science education, there is a now established focus on fostering students' meaning making through/as multimodal representations as part of their induction into the epistemic practices of the discipline. Increasingly, this agenda is aligned with an emphasis on nurturing students' creative reasoning, as researchers move to enrich theories of creativity with socio-cultural approaches. In this research, year 10 students interacted with three purpose-built multi-agent-based computational models (MABCM) to reason about key aspects of natural selection. I used the video coding software StudioCode to explore video footage (tripod-mounted cameras, web cameras, screencast recordings) of three pairs of students interacting in innovative and flexible ways with these multimodal simulations. I constructed and interpreted modified timelines of these reasoning episodes using Peirce's (1895/1998) social semiotics as framed by Magnani's eco-cognitive model (2001; 2009), which enabled a micro-ethnographic analysis of the multimodal nature of students' creative reasoning. I propose that students interacted with these digital simulations to engage in a multimodal (manipulative, visual and sentential) and creative (new ideas and their critique) process of hypothesising through/as abduction. I argue that students' creative reasoning as meaning making is powerfully interpreted through Peircean social semiotics as a fundamentally cross-modal process of: (1) integrating and moving between various modes; (2) logically executing formal and informal processes of proposition generation; (3) distributing meaning making across various agents (human and non-human); and ongoing hypothesising. I thus seek to add a logic as semiotic dimension to more linguistic accounts of multimodality and creativity in the science classroom.

Many researchers have reported that bridging analogies can productively support students' scientific meaning-making. How this can be understood semiotically is, however, not well understood. This research followed an ethnographic case study approach to investigate Year 11 students meaning-making through a process of transduction (Kress, 2000; Volkwyn, 2020) across the submicroscopic and symbolic domains of Johnstone's (1991) chemistry triangle. A "cross-and-portion" (CPO) model was devised as a bridging representation for learning the molar concentration and dilution concepts, informed by Peirce's triadic model (1931) which relates the meaning of a concept to its representation in a sign, and its referent. The study drew on video capture of the classroom and small group activity, and interviews. The research findings indicated that the CPO model acted as a visualisation tool that facilitated students to link from the submicroscopic to symbolic domains of Johnstone's triangle. A recursive model of meaning-making was formulated to describe how bridging representations are re-purposed to occupy shifting positions in Peirce's triad to enable meaning through the system of interpretance. Students constructed, critiqued and transducted across multiple, multimodal representations to achieve discursive fluency across the dimensions of Johnstone's triangle. The recursive model provides a fresh perspective on how students coordinate multimodal representations to learn science/chemistry.

This study examined 94 bilingual and emergent bilingual 10th grade students' perspectives on multimodal composing for academic purposes in their English Language Arts class. A social semiotics theoretical framework was employed to understand students' views of the affordances and constraints when composing three digital multimodal projects--a hypertext poetry analysis, a persuasive podcast, and a video literary analysis. Qualitative analysis of interviews and written reflections revealed how students overwhelmingly held a positive view of composing with multiple modes for academic purposes. Students detailed the unique semiotic resources of nonlinguistic modes for supporting their understanding of the content and innovative meaning-making. A majority of students described how communicating through multiple modes offered impactful opportunities to express their bilingual/bicultural identities as well as explore the affective dimensions of the English Language Arts content. Additionally, students explained how the process of multimodal composing fostered peer collaboration and creating meaningful connections to other works and their lives. Along with affordances, students also described a variety of challenges when designing their digital projects, including technical difficulties, uncertainty of expectations, and sufficiently representing their ideas multimodally. This study concludes with implications for how educators can learn from listening to emergent bilingual students' perspectives when integrating technology in the classroom.

Translanguaging has now become central to a sociolinguistics that foregrounds globalization and mobility as key concepts for grasping human beings' capacity to engage with and draw on both multiple linguistic -- including named languages -- and semiotic resources dynamically and in combination for the purpose of meaning-making (García, Ofelia & Wei Li. 2014. "Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education." New York: Palgrave/McMillan; Li, Wei. 2018. Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. "Applied Linguistics" 39(1). 9-30). The contributions collected here testify to the growing importance of translanguaging as a theory and practice within contexts of unprecedented mobility, namely educational and work environments, bringing to light processes of circulation of linguistic and semiotic resources across both physical and digital spaces involving the development of communicative practices as well as subjectivities and identities.

School science continues to alienate students identifying with nondominant, non-western cultures, and learners of color, and considers science as an enterprise where success necessitates divorcing the self and corporeal body from ideas and the mind. Resisting the colonizing pedagogy of the mind-body divide, we aimed at creating pedagogical spaces and places in science classes that sustain equitable opportunities for engagement and meaning making where body and mind are enmeshed. In the context of a partnership between school- and university-based educators and researchers, we explored how multimodal literacies cultivated through the performing arts, provide students from minoritized communities opportunities to both create knowledge and to position themselves as science experts and brilliant and creative meaning makers. Four theoretical perspectives (social semiotics and multimodality; dramatizing and the embodied mind; dismantling master narratives for minoritized peoples; and the relationship of knowledge production and identity construction) framed this multiple case study of classes of elementary and middle school students who made sense of and communicated science concepts and practices through embodied performances. The study provided evidence that embodied science representations afford students abundant opportunities to construct science knowledge and positionings that support engagement with science, whether performed on a small scale in classrooms, or for the whole school through a large-scale science play. Embodied dramatizing led to opportunities for collective meaning making as student-performers coordinated across various movements and modes in order to represent ideas. Multiple enactments of the same concept nurtured the development of multi-dimensional scientific, sociocultural, and sociopolitical meanings. During embodiments, students positioned themselves and others in ways that allowed expanded science identities to become possible, intertwined with other salient identities. By treating children's bodies as sites of knowledge, imagination, and expertise, integrating performing arts and science has the potential to facilitate the development of connections among ideas and between self and ideas.

Representations constitute an important part of chemistry knowledge. This paper revisits the notion of the term, symbolic, in the chemistry triangle proposed by Johnstone using the theoretical lens of social semiotics. In doing so, this paper proposes a framework of chemistry learning that highlights representational re-description and coordination as key mechanisms for facilitating connections among the three domains of knowledge: chemical phenomenon (perceptual-experiential level), macroscopic (theoretical-descriptive level) and submicroscopic (theoretical-explanatory level). This paper illustrates how this framework can be used to explore student meaning making of changes of state by examining students' interactions with the phenomena of melting and boiling and with the multiple representations of the phases of matter introduced in the classroom. The findings revealed the opportunities and challenges which emerged from student meaning making with multiple representations in the process of developing an understanding of the submicroscopic view of phase change. It also highlighted the support needed to facilitate such meaning making through representational re-description and coordination in order for students to develop a deep understanding of the logical connections between the particular model and the macroscopic patterns of the observed phenomena.

This article contributes to an emerging body of scholarship on multimodal composition in the poetry classroom through a study of Finnish lower secondary students' digital videomaking in response to poetry. The study explores students' use of semiotic resources in their interpretive work in transmediating a poem into a digital video, with a particular interest in their use of sound elements. Based on social semiotic theory of multimodality, the analysis shows how the students in a variety of ways used sound elements, together with other semiotic resources, to explore their interpretation of the poetic text. Sound elements in particular became a key resource in the interpretive work, giving the students the opportunity to elaborate on topical issues of interest and importance to them while reinforcing their social agency. The study demonstrates the relevance of sound elements in students' digital composing and explorations of poetry. Furthermore, it reveals how the students showed a capacity as well as a willingness to act, to have influence, and to make substantiated claims for recognition regarding critical issues related to sexuality and society.

This research is the second stage of my entire graphic novel practice looking at a feminist topic -- women's awakening from marriage. In this phase, the study carries out the practical process of the creative work, involving a graphic novel (body), an opening title (hook) and a package of visual communication design (promotion), in order to convey my feminist claim that women's real emancipation depends on whether they can rouse their subject awareness and break through the chain of marriage. Based on this practice-led research, my personal knowledge is generated, including the value of combining graphic novels and title sequences, the importance of symbolic storytelling and my understanding of female subjective freedom. In addition, this research potentially provides an arts-based research method, which can enable practitioner/researcher to utilise a reflective triangle model to develop art and design work.

Semiotics has been investigated in the literature to enhance second language vocabulary acquisition. The previous studies have examined how semiotics could aid second language (L2) learner to learn concrete words. This study aims at investigating the effect of semiotics on learning abstract words. Fifty-five Arab learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) participated in the study and assigned into three groups. The first group was taught abstract words using semiotics. The second group was taught concrete words using semiotics. The third group was taught the same words using a traditional way, i.e., without semiotics. Results of the post-test indicated that participants in semiotics groups (either concrete or abstract) outscored the participants who did not use semiotics to learn new words. The study concluded that semiotics is a useful tool to enhance learning new words. Also, semiotics can be more helpful in learning concrete words than abstract words.

Semiotics as a broad field of study encompasses Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). SFL has paved the way for Multimodality which is the study of different sources of meaning. This study was conducted to analyze the visual sources of meaning in children's storybooks on the basis of what Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) developed and called visual grammar. The chosen books for this study consisted of A, Apple Pie, Princess Rose and the Golden Bird, Tyrone the Horrible, and Terrible Tommy Tom Cat. The aim of this qualitative study was to investigate the interaction between the viewer and the represented participants. Accordingly, interactional meta-function was analyzed through interpreting the frequencies of each dimension of interactional meta-function in all pictures. It is supposed that there are differences in interactional meanings in storybooks in which the characters are animals and in storybooks in which the characters are human beings. The results of the present study prove the assumption of differences between the two types of storybooks. The viewer can enter into relation with represented participants in stories with human characters easier than the ones with animal characters. The findings may help teachers and syllabus designers. Specifically, teachers can choose the stories with human characters in order to make easy the process of involvement of the children with intended subject. They also can choose stories with animal characters in order to teach some strange concepts in which they do not want their students to be involved.

This case study presents the Estonian open access online platform Education on Screen. So far, the platform features two educational projects: Literature on Screen and History on Screen. Both projects are aimed at secondary school students and are balanced between a thorough treatment of a single film and a universal framework for discussing the topics of film adaptation of literary texts and the mediated construction of historical memory. The focus is thus both on film literacy and on film as a means for developing cultural literacies. The projects combine accessibly written theoretical discussions from the perspective of cultural semiotics, excerpts from films, materials relating to their production and reception, analytical tasks, and assignments for implementing individual creativity in multimodal forms. Finally, this paper includes some conclusions drawn from testing the platform with 230 students during 2017/18.

There is much concern in South Africa about the poor performance of learners in mathematics, particularly in geometry. The aim of this research was to explore the understanding of basic geometry concepts by grade 10 and grade 11 learners in terms of the van Hiele's levels of geometry thinking. The participants of the research were 147 learners from three high schools in a rural area in the south of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. The results showed that the learners had difficulties with problems involving definitions of geometric terms, interrelations of properties and shapes, class inclusion and changing semiotic representations. It was also found that most of the learners were operating at the visual and the analysis levels of the van Hiele levels of geometric thinking. It is recommended that teachers should provide learners with tasks that require movements between semiotic representations, and to also focus attention on improving learners' skills in proving aspects of mathematical relations.

The emergence of language learning websites has generated changes in intercultural communicative practices. Particularly, these sites use a wide variety of modes of communication (visual, linguistic, spatial) which allow the presence of intercultural elements. This interpretative case study analyzes the semiotic structure of one lesson of the language learning website "Livemocha" in order to unveil the presence of intercultural elements in it. Data were analyzed following a method for multimodal analysis and Byram's model of intercultural communicative competence. Findings suggest the essentialist view of culture on "Livemocha," based on festivals and food, and the potential promotion of some of Byram's intercultural skills.

What are the linguistic resources for teachers who pray in contemporary Catholic school classrooms? This article considers the intersections of prayer and language practice, and makes central two arguments. The first is that educational prayer--a particular type of teacher-led extemporaneous prayer in Catholic schools--is a linguistic phenomenon, a highly-flexible set of linguistic resources, captured within a special interactional frame marked by ambiguous boundaries which contains both prescribed formulaic linguistic properties and those which allow the performer to attend to real time classroom contingencies. Drawing on interactional data from a Catholic school classroom, this article delimits the contextualization of linguistic signs during prayer: how teachers indicate the connection between their words and the sociocultural frameworks which are relevant for that action. The second is that both interactional sociolinguists and Catholic school researchers would greatly benefit from attending to these linguistic features, from seeing prayer unfold in real-time.

The purpose of this action research piece was to discuss my experience with teaching close reading in the urban classroom using autoethnographic methods. It explains ideas and challenges that I encountered when teaching close reading in conjunction with close reading strategies. I detail close reading strategies and explain how they can be used advantageously. The article closes with ideas on how I learned the importance of promoting student self-application of strategies, incorporating strategies so that they are not time consuming, differentiating strategies, and ultimately, the idea of promoting reading for enjoyment.

Many pre-service mathematics teachers in South Africa are apprehensive about the content of Euclidean geometry, because they did not study Euclidean geometry in high school but will be expected to teach the content when they start their teaching career. This article reports on a study that explored the role of semiotic representations in pre-service teachers' reasoning about the similarity relationship between triangles. Data were generated from the written responses of 65 pre-service mathematics teachers as well as three semi-structured interviews. Duval's notions of conversions and treatments were used as a framework to understand the pre-service teachers' struggles with negotiating movements between the visual and symbolic registers of representation. The findings revealed that many pre-service teachers struggled with identifying the similarity relationship between triangles appearing in various configurations of geometric objects. While some participants were easily able to draw upon the two registers to express the relationships, one student who initially made many errors was only able to discern the necessary relationships with the help of a concrete representation that could be physically manipulated. The study therefore provided an example of how a student's errors could be used as a learning resource to lead to meaningful learning.

We propose that the discipline or practice of media literacy defined as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create media in a variety of forms can be enriched and made more effective by incorporating two of Marshall McLuhan's insights into the nature of media. The first insight is that the effects of media that are independent of their content and intended function are subliminal and they are important because they "shape and control the scale and form of human association and action." The second insight is that the notion of media includes not just communication media but also all forms of human technology, tools and artifacts. We define "mediacy" as the study, understanding and consideration of these two key insights from McLuhan, and that mediacy compliments, and enriches, the traditional media literacy approach.

Research on men's literacy practices, particularly their writing practices, is sparse. The purpose of this study was to examine the writing practices of adult men by focusing on why and how men write autobiographical comic zines and perzines of prose, poetry, and cartoons reflecting online and offline hybridity. A theory of writing as meaning making, a social semiotic perspective, and a view of masculinities as inclusive representations of gender identity informed this study. Using a multiple case study approach, we focused on five middle-class men ranging in age from their early 30s to early 40s who created zines reflecting two different writing genres: autobiographical comic zines and personal zines, or perzines. Data were triangulated by observations, photographs, informal and semi-structured interviews, demographic questionnaires, and examination of the men's zines. Data were analysed inductively by thematic analysis and deductively by principles of the theoretical framework. Findings are drawn about the type of representations, compositional constructions, messages, audience, and community. Men wrote to share life lessons, to express alternative notions of masculinities, and for catharsis. This study provides insight into the literacy practices of adult men that may serve as models to inspire and guide other men's writing.

In this paper we are interested in the relationship between disciplinary knowledge and its representation. We carry out a social semiotic analysis of a central tool used in astronomy--the Hertzsprung-Russell (H-R) diagram--in order to highlight its disciplinary and pedagogical affordances. The H-R diagram that we know today combines many layers of astronomical knowledge, whilst still retaining some rather quirky traces of its historical roots. Our analysis shows how these 'layers of knowledge' and 'historical anomalies' have resulted in a number of counterintuitive aspects within the diagram that have successively lowered its pedagogical affordance. We claim that these counterintuitive aspects give rise to potential barriers to student disciplinary learning. Using our analysis as a case study, we generalise our findings, suggesting four types of barrier to understanding that are potentially at work when students meet disciplinary-specific semiotic resources for the first time. We finish the paper by making some general suggestions about the wider use of our analysis method and ways of dealing with any barriers to learning identified. In the specific case of the H-R diagram, we suggest that lecturers should explicitly tease out its disciplinary affordances by the use of 'unpacked' resources that have a higher pedagogical affordance.

The aim of this article is to discuss how a multimodal approach to meaning-making can contribute to language education and how multimodal meaning-making is supported in the Swedish curricula. Considering the rapid digitalization of contemporary communication, the aim and content of language education has been challenged. The article describes contemporary communication and meaning-making from a sociosemiotic, multimodal approach. Based on an example from a poetry assignment and students' solutions in a Swedish as a first language framework, we want to discuss the possibilities and challenges for meaningmaking and teaching, while opening up the subject of Swedish for multimodality. Two poems are viewed from a multimodal perspective showing the usage of different modes and media. Based on this the article investigates the support in the curricula for multimodal meaning-making. The article concludes by stressing the importance of recognizing multimodal meaning-making as learning in language education.

This paper investigates the potential aspects of visual literacy that might appear when visual analytics and students interact in social science secondary classrooms. Interacting with visual technology likely demands new forms of literacy as various dimensions of complexity emerge in such learning activities where reading imposes order and relevance on what is displayed. However, only a few studies have evaluated how these visual processes emerge. Applying a socio-material semiotic approach, this paper examines the interactions between teachers, students and a visual analytics application, clarifying what strengthens or weakens the socio-material relations at work in emerging visual literacy. Methodologically, a designbased research approach is chosen. Notably, it is the early stages of the designed-based research cycle that are applied. Interventions were designed and conducted in five classes in three secondary schools in Sweden (97 students). The visual analytics application introduced was Statistics eXplorer. For each class, two to three lessons were video recorded to capture how the students interacted with the application. The socio-material analyses show that the interactions between the visual analytics and the students were both strengthened and weakened by different social as well as material forces. The actions were directed by visual properties such as movement, highlighting, and color, properties that often resulted in quick vision or locked vision. This paper argues that there needs to be a close didactic alignment and deeper knowledge of how visual interfaces attract students' attention and how students' visual literacy emerges in that relationship.

In this paper we discuss the role of transduction in the teaching and learning of science. We video-filmed pairs of upper-secondary physics students working with a laboratory task designed to encourage transduction (Bezemer & Kress, 2008). The students were simply instructed to use a hand-held electronic measurement device (IOLab) to find the direction of the Earth's magnetic field and mark its direction using a paper arrow. A full multimodal transcription of the student interaction was made. In our analysis of this transcription we identify three separate transductions of meaning. In particular, we observed that student transduction of meaning to the paper arrow allowed it to function as both a persistent placeholder for all the meaning making that had occurred up until that point and as a coordinating hub for further meaning making. Our findings lead us to recommend that teachers interrogate the set of resources necessary for appropriate disciplinary knowledge construction in the tasks they present to students. Here, teachers should think carefully about whether the introduction of a persistent placeholder would be useful and in that case what this placeholder could be. We also suggest that teachers should think about what persistent resource may function as a coordinating hub for the students. Finally, we suggest that teachers should be on the lookout for student transductions to new semiotic resources in their classrooms as a sign that learning is taking place. We claim that the constraining and complementary nature of transduction offers a good opportunity for teachers to check student understanding, since disciplinary meanings need to be coherent across semiotic systems (modes).

There is currently a consensus in mathematics education that favors constructivist instructional models, which are based on the inquiry of knowledge by students. There are, however, different views that consider objectivist models, based on knowledge transmission (direct or explicit teaching) more effective in the teaching of scientific disciplines. In this article we analyze an instructional process on elementary probability directed to prospective primary education teachers, which was designed under constructivist principles and is based on data analysis projects. A systematic analysis of the study process reveals that the optimization of the learning process involves implementing frequent moments that require explicit transmission of knowledge by the teacher. This analysis is based on some theoretical tools from the onto-semiotic approach to mathematical knowledge and instruction, which allow identifying significant didactical facts that support a mixed instructional model. The relevance for mathematics education to contemplate the use of mixed instructional models that articulate constructivists and objectivist approaches to promote mathematical learning is concluded.

Mathematical argumentation and proof has long been identified with algebraization. Much literature discusses the relationship between the two, but with little specificity on how particular semiotic features in argumentation relate to coordination in early algebra. Further, there is a particular lack of research on this topic in the elementary/primary years of schooling. The present study examines how children's unit coordination in early algebra (particularly the concepts of equivalence and multiplicative reasoning) co-occurs with their coordination of grammatical information units. Coordination of information units was examined through reference use via the semiotic tool of detailing. Results suggest that second and third grade students who coordinate reference chains to support a mathematical claim in their argumentative writing tend to have higher multiplicative reasoning and conception of equivalence scores on several tasks. However, features of certain tasks may influence whether and how such unit coordination interacts with reference use.