Social Semiotic Approach Research Articles

Towards a semiotics of typography

This article outlines a social semiotic approach to analysing the ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning potentials of letter forms, drawing on Jakobson’s distinctive feature analysis and Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of experiential metaphor. Distinctive features are recognized and applied to the analysis of examples: weight, expansion, slope, curvature, connectivity, orientation and regularity.

What does Social Semiotics have to Offer Mathematics Education Research?

Social Semiotics, based on the work of the linguist Michael Halliday, emphasises the ways in which language functions in our construction and representation of our experience and of our social identities and relationships. In this paper, I provide an introduction to the theory and its analytic tools, considering how they can be applied in the field of mathematics education. Some research questions that may be raised and addressed from this perspective are identified. An illustrative example is offered, demonstrating a social semiotic approach to addressing questions related to construction of the nature of school mathematical activity in writing produced by secondary school students.

Meaning of the Terms Culture and Civilization in the Greek Newspapers “Macedonia” and “Thessaloniki”: A Social Semiotic Approach

Meaning of the Terms Culture and Civilization in the Greek Newspapers “Macedonia” and “Thessaloniki”: A Social Semiotic Approach

Theoretical Advances in Critical Visual Analysis: Perception, Ideology, Mythologies, and Social Semiotics

This article discusses how social semiotics is contributing to advancing the field of critical visual analysis. First, the article introduces social semiotics as a discipline, by outlining its theoretical foundations, methodological principles, and scholarly agenda. Second, it discusses how established paradigms such as semiotics, iconography, and cultural studies have approached notions such as meaning and ideology in relation to visual signification. Third, it discusses the distinctive nature of the social semiotic approach to ideology in visual analysis. The article finally argues that the critical ends of social semiotics can benefit greatly from a closer - critical and political - reading of Barthes' Mythologies (1970/1990) as well as an increased concern with the role of perception in visual signification.

Symbols Make Text

Research on early script-learning has shown that young children produce a considerable variety of graphic forms in their spontaneous writing. Social semiotic theory aims to account for this variety by analysing the links between children’s sociocultural experience and their interpretation of written language as a visual sign system. This paper applies a social semiotic approach to a multilingual context, discussing texts produced by three- and four-year-olds in a nursery class, where the roleplay area was enriched with everyday literacy materials and parents were invited to write in different languages in the classroom. Evidence from a year’s fieldwork showed that children used a diversity of symbols throughout this period. Three factors were found to have explanatory significance: (a) awareness of the visual appearance of different types of text, (b) children’s current symbolic repertoire, and (c) their social identity as writers. Multilingual experience was incorporated into children’s exploration of how writing operated as a representational system.

Materiality as an aspect in learning

In this paper we exemplify how a social semiotic approach to pupils’ multimodal texts (texts which draw on and make available to the senses a range of resources, including the visual, material, and actional) can provide a way into understanding learning. We suggest that learning can be seen as a transformative process of sign making. Specifically, we suggest that materiality (use of frame, shape, texture, colour, and imported objects) can be seen as one expression of how pupils engage with knowledge and learning. In order to demonstrate this we focus on year seven (11 year old) pupils’ visual representations of cells in two science classrooms at a London girls school. We argue that the range of representational resources available within visual communication (spatial relations, materiality, etc.) enabled the expression of kinds of meaning which would have been difficult, or perhaps impossible, in language. We conclude that visual and linguistic modes of expression have different potentials for meaning making, and therefore different potentials for learning.

Uncovering music in the National Curriculum ‐ a social semiotic approach to the title page

ABSTRACTThis article embraces the notion that visual design, with or without accompanying text, has developed particular characteristics that encode messages between author and reader which often operate below a level of consciousness. As such, it accepts the premise put forward by Kress (1993) that all signs are motivated, rather than arbitrary, and draws heavily on the work of Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) and other extensive literature in the field. The design subjected to this type of analysis or reading is the title page of Music in the National Curriculum published by the Department For Education in 1995. The article tries to show how the design alone represents a particular view of knowledge and a particular approach to curriculum design, which is then confirmed in the subsequent pages.