Abstract
Classroom communication is increasingly accepted as multimodal, through the orchestrated use of different semiotic modes, resources, and systems. There is growing interest in examining the meaning-making potential of other modes (e.g., gestural, visual, kinesthetic) beyond the semiotic mode of language, in classroom communication and in student reasoning in science. In this paper, we explore the use of a multi-layered analytical framework in an investigation of student reasoning during an open inquiry into the physical phenomenon of dissolving in a primary classroom. The 24 students, who worked in pairs, were video recorded in a facility purposefully designed to capture their verbal and non-verbal interactions during the science session. By employing a multi-layered analytical framework, we were able to identify the interplays between the different semiotic modes and the level of reasoning undertaken by the students as they worked through the tasks. This analytical process uncovered a variety of ways in which the students negotiated ideas and coordinated semiotic resources in their exploration of dissolving. This paper highlights the affordances and challenges of this multi-layered analytical framework for identifying the dynamic inter-relationships between different modes that the students drew on to grapple with the complexity of the physical phenomenon of dissolving.
Highlights
Research on the semiotic mode of language as a social action and cultural resource in communicating meaning in classrooms has a long tradition [1,2]
This expanded concept of classroom discourse presents both theoretical and methodological challenges for researchers who are interested in understanding how teaching and learning takes place through this complex ensemble of multiple and multimodal representations in a classroom settings, such as a science classroom. Research in this area explores the nature of this coordination of multimodal semiotic resources in student reasoning about science phenomena and to understand how the different modes interact in discourse to generate meanings [12]
We applied a multi-layered analytic framework for an exploration of classroom communication as multimodal phenomena that focuses on different units of analysis for the purpose of generating insight into student reasoning in science
Summary
Research on the semiotic mode of language as a social action and cultural resource in communicating meaning in classrooms has a long tradition [1,2]. Classroom discourse is increasingly being recognized as multimodal rather than linguistic, through the orchestrated use of different semiotic modes, resources, and systems [11] This expanded concept of classroom discourse presents both theoretical and methodological challenges for researchers who are interested in understanding how teaching and learning takes place through this complex ensemble of multiple and multimodal representations in a classroom settings, such as a science classroom. Research in this area explores the nature of this coordination of multimodal semiotic resources in student reasoning about science phenomena and to understand how the different modes interact in discourse to generate meanings [12]. Our focus is to interrogate the affordances of this multi-layered framework, for identifying ways in which the students used different modes to reason and generate meanings about the process of dissolving a solid substance into a liquid, a phenomenon that is not directly observable but can only be understood through inferences
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