Multiliteracies for academic purposes : a metafunctional exploration of intersemiosis and multimodality in university textbook and computer-based learning resources in science

This thesis is situated in the research field of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) in education and within a professional context of multiliteracies for academic purposes. The overall aim of the research is to provide a metafunctional account of multimodal and multisemiotic meaning-making in print and electronic learning materials in first year science at university. The educational motivation for the study is to provide insights for teachers and educational designers to assist them in the development of students’ multiliteracies, particularly in the context of online learning environments. The corpus comprises online and CD-ROM learning resources in biology, physics and chemistry and textbooks in physics and biology, which are typical of those used in undergraduate science courses in Australia. Two underlying themes of the research are to compare the different affordances of textbook and screen formats and the disciplinary variation found in these formats. The two stage research design consisted of a multimodal content analysis, followed by a SF-based multimodal discourse analysis of a selection of the texts. In the page and screen formats of these pedagogical texts, the analyses show that through the mechanisms of intersemiosis, ideationally, language and image are reconstrued as disciplinary knowledge. This knowledge is characterised by a high level of technicality in image and verbiage, by taxonomic relations across semiotic resources and by interdependence among elements in the image, caption, label and main text. Interpersonally, pedagogical roles of reader/learner/viewer/ and writer/teacher/designer are enacted differently to some extent across formats through the different types of activities on the page and screen but the source of authority and truth remains with the teacher/designer, regardless of format. Roles are thus minimally negotiable, despite the claims of interactivity in the screen texts. Textually, the organisation of meaning across text and image in both formats is reflected in the layout, which is determined by the underlying design grid and in the use of graphic design resources of colour, font, salience and juxtaposition. Finally, through the resources of grammatical metaphor and the reconstrual of images as abstract, both forms of semiosis work together to shift meanings from congruence to abstraction, into the specialised realm of science

Believing is seeing : awareness and alignment in the acquisition and communication of social meaning

When speakers engage in the complex phenomenon of speech, they use language to convey and understand social information about identities, stances, moods and goals through the use of linguistic forms. While it is true that social evaluation studies have demonstrated that individuals show awareness of the socially-indexed meaning of linguistic forms, many expected associations are not always, if at all, identifiable by listeners. Such asymmetry raises a significant question in sociolinguistic research: if individuals cannot reliably show an awareness of social meaning, how can it be used as a resource to construct identities, stances and personas? Building on the growing body of work which examines individuals’ agency and awareness of socially-indexed meaning, this study’s objective was to investigate the role of individuals’ beliefs and their alignment to linguistic forms in the awareness of socially-indexed meaning. The specific aim of the current study was to examine the apparent mismatches between expected socially-indexed meanings born of linguistic variables which are socially stratified and individuals’ actual sociolinguistic awareness. An experimental series was designed which employed social evaluation judgements combined with corpus analyses and self-report tasks to investigate the role of the individual in the acquisition and communication of social meaning. The research questions targeted the situational context (no-context vs a workplace), the variant’s social salience (stereotypes, markers and indicators), the alignment of the individual to a linguistic form (a user of the form vs a non-user), and the method by which the association between the form and social category were acquired (implicitly vs explicitly). Two languages were chosen for their suitability and validity towards the current project’s research questions and aims; namely, Japanese and Australian English. Within the languages, sociolinguistically relevant variables and categories were chosen to provide a rigorous examination of individuals’ perceptual awareness of socially-indexed meaning, investigate how associations are learned by individuals, and examine the role of individual alignment to a linguistic variable and its expected social meaning. Overall, the results of the experimental series suggested that the explicit beliefs and the alignment of the individual to a linguistic form mediates their linguistic experience and thus shapes their awareness of the form’s socially indexed meaning. While the situational context of the linguistic form did not impact individuals’ judgements considerably in the current study, the social salience of the form was shown to play a role as a factor which mediates individuals’ awareness of the form’s socially-indexed meaning. In the case of individual alignment, speakers who do not identify as users of a particular variant appear to be more sensitive to the social meaning of the variant than those who identify as users. Finally, on the notion of acquisition, individuals showed awareness of indexical associations that did not reflect the distribution of the variant in the speech community, suggesting that a mechanism may exist by which individuals override their linguistic experience to reflect socially constructed beliefs about the distribution of forms

Doing being an ordinary technology and social media user

This paper uses discourse and conversation analysis of naturally-occuring conversations to describe how participants construct themselves as “ordinary” users of communication technologies—devices such as mobile phones, their communicative affordances, and the mediated interaction they enable (e.g., access to online communication via social media platforms). The three practices analyzed are (1) managing motivations by downplaying interest and stake in using technology and participating in online activities; (2) calibrating quantities of one's time and involvement using social media; (3) identifying investments in social media use through categories and identities that position users as appropriate or inappropriate. These techniques comprise an accounting practice that accomplishes identity construction in service of situated social actions to manage the moral implications of communication technology use

Variations and Application Conditions Of the Data Type »Image« - The Foundation of Computational Visualistics

Few years ago, the department of computer science of the University Magdeburg invented a completely new diploma programme called 'computational visualistics', a curriculum dealing with all aspects of computational pictures. Only isolated aspects had been studied so far in computer science, particularly in the independent domains of computer graphics, image processing, information visualization, and computer vision. So is there indeed a coherent domain of research behind such a curriculum? The answer to that question depends crucially on a data structure that acts as a mediator between general visualistics and computer science: the data structure "image". The present text investigates that data structure, its components, and its application conditions, and thus elaborates the very foundations of computational visualistics as a unique and homogenous field of research. Before concentrating on that data structure, the theory of pictures in general and the definition of pictures as perceptoid signs in particular are closely examined. This includes an act-theoretic consideration about resemblance as the crucial link between image and object, the communicative function of context building as the central concept for comparing pictures and language, and several modes of reflection underlying the relation between image and image user. In the main chapter, the data structure "image" is extendedly analyzed under the perspectives of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. While syntactic aspects mostly concern image processing, semantic questions form the core of computer graphics and computer vision. Pragmatic considerations are particularly involved with interactive pictures but also extend to the field of information visualization and even to computer art. Four case studies provide practical applications of various aspects of the analysis

Structuring Language and Community in an Online Space

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) present an interesting area for linguistic and social research, being a setting for of computer-mediated communication (CMC) that is task-oriented in nature and often requires high level of cooperation between players. This study investigates how Spanish-speaking players of the MMO Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn use the linguistic phenomena of discourse markers, laughter and politeness to structure their communication and their community. Through analysis of in-game conversations gathered from a community of said players, this study demonstrates how each of these phenomena work together to build a community based on inclusive language and positive reinforcement

Doing pedagogical research in engineering

This is a book

A multimodal framework for computer mediated learning : the reshaping of curriculum knowledge and learning

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