Amy A. Wilson

A Social Semiotics Framework for Conceptualizing Content Area Literacies

The author outlines ways in which conceptions of texts and literacy may be distinctive across academic disciplines. Framed in theories of social semiotics, she asserts that each discipline is recreated through a series of texts, defined broadly to include any instances of communication. Texts in each content area not only instantiate a particular body of content, but also instantiate social practices and roles in relation to that content. After outlining how content and social roles may vary according to each discipline, the author concludes that content area literacy instruction can include encouraging students to recognize and reflect on these differences in texts and the practices surrounding them, thereby helping students to develop metadiscursive frameworks for navigating content area literacies.

“From the Koran and Family Guy”: Expressions of Identity in English Learners’ Digital Podcasts

Framed in theories of social semiotics, this teacher research describes the implementation of a five-month unit on student identity in an eighth-grade reading/writing class for English learners. After learning about principles for multimodal design, students made their own digital podcasts in response to unit questions such as “Who am I?” and “Where do I come from?” The authors analyzed six students’ podcasts using a multimodal transcription chart, comparing these podcasts to students’ assignments throughout the unit and to student interviews about the podcasts. The authors’ analysis suggests that the podcasts promoted language development and enabled the students to simultaneously use multiple cultural and communicative resources in synergistic ways to express hybrid identities.

Motivating Young Writers Through Write‐Talks: Real Writers, Real Audiences, Real Purposes

Modeled after the popular teaching technique of book talks, write talks are brief motivational talks designed to engage students in writing. Teachers can invite adults from their communities into their classrooms to give write talks, thereby conveying to students that real people go through different writing processes to write real texts for real audiences.

Middle School Teachers’ Discipline-Specific Use of Gestures and Implications for Disciplinary Literacy Instruction

Framed in theories of social semiotics, this descriptive multiple case study examined six middle school teachers’ use of gestures during one school year as they each taught two different subject areas: earth science, language arts, mathematics, and/or social studies. The data, which included field notes and photographs from 354 lessons and 151 video-recordings of lesson segments, were analyzed using constant comparative methods and multimodal concordance charts. The analyses indicated discipline-specific differences in types of gestures, frequency of gestures, and centrality of gestures to the teachers’ messages. Earth science depended on a variety of iconic and deictic gestures, the latter of which was also common in mathematics. Communications in language arts and social studies commonly included non- essential action gestures that mimicked the movements of characters and historical figures. This study modifies existing claims of the importance of gestures in teaching, suggesting that gestures can play relatively central or minor roles in communicating disciplinary concepts. It concludes with implications for disciplinary literacy instruction that more rigorously accounts for the role that gestures play in disciplinary learning.

A Social Semiotic Analysis of Instructional Images across Academic Disciplines

Framed in theories of social semiotics, this descriptive multiple case study examined the images used by six middle-school teachers during one school year as they each taught two different subject areas: earth science, language arts, mathematics, and/or social studies. Using Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual grammar to analyze these images, this study identified discipline-specific patterns in how 1,132 images realized assumptions in regards to the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions of communication. A content analysis suggested discipline-specific differences in the presumed social distance between the content of the images and the students, as well as discipline-specific differences in assumptions about the subjectivity of knowledge. Instructional implications are suggested, such as encouraging students to critique the assumptions in images and selecting a wider array of image types in each discipline.

Book Review: B. Edmiston, Forming Ethical Identities in Early Childhood Play. New York: Routledge, 2008. 213 pp. ISBN 978—0-415—4358—2 (pbk)

In his description of the festivities of carnival, Bakhtin (1984) invited his readers to consider the relationship between play and identity. During these festivities, people historically donned ‘grotesque’ personas whose actions and appearances inverted rigid religious ideals. Bakhtin did not consider carnival to be separate from life, a mere frivolity to which people could resort to escape reality. Nor did he view carnival as a trivial festival from which people could return unchanged. Rather, ‘in reality, [carnival] is life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play’ (p. 7). Using this pattern of play, people could question imposed moral mandates and try on new identities. They could parody themselves and the world around them, consequently enabling them to view both as being open for reinterpretation due to their ‘gay relativity’ (p. 11). Additionally, during carnival, social hierarchies were flattened when all people participated together in acts of profound playing, with no sideline spectators, which left each person with a sense of new social identity and shared humanity. In Forming Ethical Identities in Early Childhood Play, Brian Edmiston describes his participation in carnivalesque types of play with his son Michael as he was growing up. Rather than asserting power over his young son in an adult/child hierarchical relationship, and rather than firmly instructing him regarding what he should do to be moral, the author sought to share power with his son as the two co-constructed play spaces in which ethically ambiguous scenarios often emerged. The pair assumed personas of monsters, vampires, dragons, and other ‘evil’ or ‘good’ archetypal characters, and in so doing, they grappled with difficult ethical issues and they jointly co-authored identities as ethical people in relation to these issues. As his title suggests, Edmiston framed his book with three primary, interwoven concepts: play, identity, and ethics. This book review provides journal of early childhood l iteracy 9(1)