Recontextualization as embodied and embedded sense-making activity: An ecosocial semiotic approach to languaging dynamics of teacher talk in university literature classrooms

Abstract

The study aims to investigate the multimodal ensembles represented in teachers’ pedagogic recontextualization of literary texts in university literature teaching, which are designed to understand how the institutional knowledge of literature and literary texts is recontextualized dynamically in teacher talk as an embodied and embedded sense-making activity. The study thus focuses on the embodiment and embeddedness of the teacher talk as the analytical focus to explore teachers’ languaging dynamics when they engage with and recontextualize literary texts in classroom talk. Multimodal interaction analysis is employed to explore not only the embodied semiotic modes but also the environmentally embedded resources used in the pedagogic practices of second language (L2) tertiary literature education. The study demonstrates an ecosocial semiotic approach to explore bodily and extrabodily resources employed in teacher talk, arguing for the interactivity of the environmental affordances with the bodily languaging behaviors in the whole-body sense-making activity. It shows how bodily dynamics such as vocalizing and gesticulating are assembled and coordinated with sociocultural artifacts and environmental affordances in constructing whole-body sense-making activity that affords students’ perception and cognition of the literary text. The paper argues that the dynamic process of literary text recontextualization mobilizes an integrated speech-gesture-environment interactivity in the meaning-making and semiotic process of teacher talk through embodied and embedded pedagogy to support shared knowledge construction and enable text comprehension that are often considered unthinkable.