Gunther Kress

Writing in Multimodal Texts A Social Semiotic Account of Designs for Learning

Frequently writing is now no longer the central mode of representation in learning materials—textbooks, Web-based resources, teacher-produced materials. Still (as well as moving) images are increasingly prominent as carriers of meaning. Uses and forms of writing have undergone profound changes over the last decades, which calls for a social, pedagogical, and semiotic explanation. Two trends mark that history. The digital media, rather than the (text) book, are more and more the site of appearance and distribution of learning resources, and writing is being displaced by image as the central mode for representation. This poses sharp questions about present and future roles and forms of writing. For text, design and principles of composition move into the foreground. Here we sketch a social semiotic account that aims to elucidate such principles and permits consideration of their epistemological as well as social/pedagogic significance. Linking representation with social factors, we put forward terms to explore two issues: the principles underlying the design of multimodal ensembles and the potential epistemological and pedagogic effects of multimodal designs. Our investigation is set within a research project with a corpus of learning resources for secondary school in Science, Mathematics, and English from the 1930s, the 1980s, and from the first decade of the 21st century, as well as digitally represented and online learning resources from the year 2000 onward.

Colour as a semiotic mode: notes for a grammar of colour

This article presents a brief review of several approaches of ‘grammar’, as the basis for a discussion of culturally produced regularities in the uses of colour; that is, the possibility of extending the use of ‘grammar’ to colour as a communicational resource. Colour is discussed as a semiotic resource - a mode, which, like other modes, is multifunctional in its uses in the culturally located making of signs. The authors make some use of the Jakobson/Halle theory of ‘distinctive features’, highlighting as signifier-resources those of differentiation, saturation, purity, modulation, value and hue. These are treated as features of a grammar of colour rather than as features of colour itself. The article demonstrates its theoretical points through the analysis of several examples and links notions of ‘colour schemes’ and ‘colour harmony’ into the social and cultural concept of grammar in the more traditional sense.

Critical Discourse Analysis.

The label Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used by a significant number of scholars with a diverse set of concerns in a number of disciplines. It is well-exemplified by the editorial statement of the journal Discourse and Society , which defines its envisaged domain of enquiry as follows: “the reproduction of sexism and racism through discourse; the legitimation of power; the manufacture of consent; the role of politics, education and the media; the discursive reproduction of dominance relation between groups; the imbalances in international communication and information.” While some practitioners of Critical Discourse Analysis might want to amend this list here or there, the set of concerns sketched here well describes the field of CDA. The only comment I would make, a comment crucial for many practitioners of CDA, is to insist that these phenomena are to be found in the most unremarkable and everyday of texts—and not only in texts which declare their special status in some way. This scope, and the overtly political agenda, serves to set CDA off on the one hand from other kinds of discourse analysis, and from textlinguistics (as well as from pragmatics and sociolinguistics) on the other.

Multimodality: Challenges to Thinking About Language

* Nearly every text that I look at uses two modes of communication: (a) language as writing and (b) image. Yet TESOL professionals continue to act as though language fully represented the meanings they wish to encode and communicate. Yes, they admit that other features are important, but if pressed, the linguist and the applied linguist (the language teacher, let us say) would maintain that their business was language, after all, and these other things were someone elses to look after.

Finding the Keys to Biliteracy: How Young Children Interpret Different Writing Systems.

This paper discusses ways in which young bilingual children understand the principles underlying different writing systems. Six case studies were conducted, involving six-year-olds growing up in London who were learning to write in Chinese, Arabic or Spanish at the same time as English. The childrens formal and informal literacy interactions were observed at home, community language school and primary school. Peer teaching sessions were also set up so that children could demonstrate their ideas about Chinese, Arabic or Spanish to primary school classmates. Findings show that these young emergent biliterates were able to grasp concepts from different systems, by producing their own interpretations of the input provided by teachers and family. A discussion follows as to whether such understandings were heightened by dealing with more than one writing system, and whether the research points to a more general propensity amongst young children to look for the principles involved in graphic representation. Finally, the paper argues that mainstream educators need to recognise the cognitive gains for minority-language children who are becoming biliterate and offer support for this important area of learning.

The multisemiotic resources of biliterate children

This article argues that children gain access to an enhanced range of communicative resources through familiarity with more than one writing system. Different scripts can be seen as different modes, giving rise to a variety of potentials for meaning-making. In case-studies of children’s responses to learning Chinese, Arabic or Spanish as well as English at the age of six, they were found to be exploring these potentials in terms of symbol design, spatial framing and directionality. A multimodal analysis shows how children can build up ‘embodied knowledges’ as they construct different visual and actional dispositions through the bilingual script-learning experience. Such flexibility is likely to be an asset in a world that makes increasing use of multilingual and multimodal communication.

'Partnerships in research’ : Multimodality and ethnography

Argued from the perspective of a Social Semiotic Multimodal theory the article asks whether and in what ways ‘Ethnography’ and ‘Social Semiotics’ can or should be brought together to mutual advantage. It suggests that such an enterprise is ‘of its time’: the world as mirrored in existing disciplines has changed and the disciplines that co-constituted and co-evolved with that world can no longer do the job they once did in a now differently constituted world, which poses problems that may need the complementary capacities of related theories and methodologies. This is not an argument for ‘triangulation of data’. Drawing on examples from empirical research, the article points to the gaps which may emerge between research aims and the capacities of specific theories and methodologies to provide, or not, adequate and full answers to aims and questions. Through exemplifications the article raises questions about ‘epistemological compatibility’ of theories and methodologies that are brought into conjunction and asks to what extent we can expect descriptive and analytic complementarity in outcomes if two approaches are epistemologically incompatible? In this, the article opens the new issue of the ‘reach of a theory’.

“You've Just Got to Learn How to See”: Curriculum Subjects, Young People and Schooled Engagement with the World

Abstract In this article, the author begins by addressing questions surrounding the issue of “literacy” and reflects on some aims of literacy curricula in culturally plural postindustrial societies. He then adopts a social semiotic multimodal approach to data analysis in which there is a sharp focus on the semiotic modes that are in play and on the forms of classroom learning that they facilitate. He makes a decisive break with theories that have been more or less dominant through the twentieth century, that have insisted that we are language (or sign) users, but that we do not affect the shape of the system. Essentially, Kress works from the theoretical position that the sign-maker is constantly transformative of the set of resources of the group and of her/himself. In the analyses, he shows how learning in the art class is a different kind of learning to that engaged in the drama class, and in the analysis of a media text or a novel in the English classroom. The final section of the article raises questions for a curriculum of communication in schooling.

“Do you have another Johan?” Negotiating meaning in the operating theatre

This paper discusses language use at a workplace in a context of instability and diversity. Its focus is on the operating theatre, where communication is an integral part of complex, collaborative tasks, impacting on patient-safety, staff well-being and overall quality of health care. In the operating theatre health care professionals gather to work on the recurring task of surgical operations, in teams that exist only for the duration or parts of the task. Not only do the members of these unstable teams have different professional backgrounds, such as surgery and nursing, they also draw on different, social, cultural and linguistic resources. The paper shows how this instability and diversity which is so characteristic of contemporary society plays out in the moment-by-moment use of language at the operating table. On the basis of prolonged fieldwork in a London hospital and a unique set of audio- and video-recordings we show how surgeons formulate requests and how nurses and surgical trainees disambiguate these requests on the basis of their prior experiences with surgical instruments and equipment, the surgical procedure, and, crucially, the surgeon‘s ‗idiolect‘. We analyze instances where this process of disambiguation is highly successful, as well as examples where it is not. We tease out the strategies that nurses and surgeons deploy to deal with this ambiguity and explore ways to deal with instability and diversity in professional communication.

Knowledge, identity and pedagogy: Pedagogic Discourse and the Representational Environments of Education in Late Modernity

Abstract This article examines changes in the representational communicational landscapes of the contemporary world and their profound effects on education in its institutional form. In particular the changes have effects in four areas: (1) in the agendas of public education; (2) in the shifting relations of the lifewords of child, school, and forms of the economy and in the changing relations of economy and forms of communications; (3) in a set of issues, concerned with the “sites” of education: where does or is education taking place?; and (4) lastly, generally, the new arrangements of media and modes of representation. All are likely to unsettle the relative stabilities of the structures in which “pedagogic discourse” function, and to threaten the processes wherein forms of social identity were imagined, and projected by the school.