Abstract
AbstractThis 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.
Highlights
Social semiotics theory has been widely used to understand the language and meaningmaking in the science classroom
This paper presents an argument that meaning-making with multimodal representations in science learning is always contextualized within a genre and, what constitutes an ongoing genre depends on a multimodal coordination of speech, gesture, diagrams, symbols, and material objects
The use of representations follows a general pattern that varies across different genres. This pattern within multimodal genres both arises from and realizes the repetitive actions of our communication (Bateman, 2008). It accounts for why we expect certain characteristics in the representations used within a particular genre; for instance, a diagram for an explanation should go beyond depicting macroscopic observations or a report should emphasize taxonomic relationships in both its written and visual forms
Summary
Social semiotics theory has been widely used to understand the language and meaningmaking in the science classroom. Seminal studies from this theoretical tradition include Talking Science (Lemke, 1990), Writing Science (Halliday & Martin, 1993), Reading Science (Martin & Veel, 1998), and Multimodal Teaching and Learning (Kress, Jewitt, Ogborn, & Tsatsarelis, 2001). Genre has been used to examine the linguistic structure in scientific written texts such as explanation or experimental account (e.g., Rose & Martin, 2012; Tang, 2016a; Unsworth, 2001). Most studies in this strand seldom take into account the role of genre as the overarching “context of culture” (Halliday, 1999) that shapes how people use and create representations
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