Volume 14, Issue 3

This study examines how trainers at a Japanese insurance company use inscribed objects (insurance brochures) during roleplay training sessions to instruct novice agents in professional sales practices. Roleplay training is widely employed across professional settings to prepare novices for institutional interactions, yet studies have focused primarily on talk, leaving the use of objects largely unexplored. Using multimodal conversation analysis, this research addresses this gap by investigating how trainers instruct novice agents in the use of institutional objects through dual framing of roleplays. The analyses demonstrate how trainers simultaneously maintain two interactional frames: a roleplay frame where participants enact customer – agent categories through category – bound activities, and a training frame where trainer – trainee identities become relevant through instructional actions. The analysis reveals two key instructional actions accomplished through dual framing with brochures: assisting and correcting trainees’ roleplay performances. These findings contribute to institutional interaction studies by illuminating how professional competence with task – essential inscribed objects is instructed through dual framing that enables situated instruction tailored to trainees’ immediate performances without disrupting the sequential organization of roleplay interactions.

In 2022, Spain’s educational reform introduced the term “multimodal texts” into the Secondary Education curriculum for foreign languages. To examine the relationship between current teaching practices and this new curriculum, this study explores the knowledge, practices, and beliefs of secondary English teachers regarding the use of visual and multimodal texts in the English classroom. A total of 36 EFL teachers in Spain participated anonymously in this study by completing a validated questionnaire consisting of 63 items. The findings reveal teachers’ positive perspectives on visual education and multimodal literacy, alongside the challenges they encounter. While teachers report a substantial understanding of visual and multimodal literacies, key difficulties emerged, particularly in the use of metalanguage and multimodal assessment, confirming the findings of previous studies. This study seeks to address a gap in the literature, as empirical research on Spanish secondary EFL teachers’ beliefs concerning visual and multimodal literacies remains limited. Ultimately, the goal is to support the succesful implementation of visual and multimodal literacies by providing valuable insights for policymakers and teacher educators. Additionally, these findings have broader implications for other educational systems aiming to integrate multimodal and visual literacies into their curricula.

With the growing marketization of higher education in China, the About-us webpage of universities has become an important venue for academic institutions to display both introductory information and self-promotional content to attract prospective students. This study draws on multimodal genre analysis to examine and compare the generic structure of the About-us webpages of two academic associations: C9 universities (nine public, top-tier universities) and Sino-foreign cooperative (or international) universities. We analyze how these two groups of universities structure their webpages differently across three layers: layout, rhetorical, and navigational features. The findings suggest that both groups employ rhetorical moves, such as providing an overview of the university and establishing academic credentials. However, C9 universities narrate their histories and political affiliation, while Sino-foreign universities elaborate on their international-oriented education through the massive use of multimodal resources. This study contributes to the framework of multimodal genre analysis, demonstrating how Chinese academic institutions strategically mobilize linguistic and visual resources to engage with Chinese sociopolitical discourses.

The present paper originates from a research partnership established between the author and the Italian coffee company Caffè Motta (Salerno) within a research project held between 2022 and 2024. The project, which included the collection of both oral and written documents, interviews, and visits to the plant, aimed to investigate the company’s sustainability initiatives and policies to produce a bilingual glossary of sustainability. As part of this broad project, the present study considers the English ‘Sustainability’ page from Caffè Motta’s website to answer several research questions about the choice of specific images to represent corporate sustainability. The first part of the analysis provides a multimodal analysis of both verbal and visual elements. Subsequently, the analysis reflects on whether these texts and images effectively convey the company’s sustainability messages, given its wide range of initiatives and actions currently implemented. Finally, the paper discusses the role of culture in the construction and interpretation of sustainability images, as well as the function of sustainability in corporate identity building, particularly considering Italy’s renowned ‘coffee culture’. Overall, this study aims to complete the mapping of the company’s available sustainability information, also in light of the forthcoming glossary to be used for the company’s sustainability communications.

In Tanzania, political posters function as strategic communication tools within the linguistic landscape, showcasing leadership achievements and national progress. This study analysed 105 political posters from Dar es Salaam to explore how they communicate the accomplishments of the sixth phase government under President Samia. Guided by social semiotics and framing theories, the research examined how visuals, text, and symbols combine to construct narratives of progress, trust, and legitimacy. The posters employed bold colours, simplified Kiswahili messages, and symbolic imagery to make political achievements relatable and accessible. They highlighted milestones in infrastructure, agriculture, education, healthcare, energy, sports, and tourism, often featuring the President’s portrait to personalise and reinforce the connection between leadership and development. Positioned in high-traffic public areas, these posters saturated the urban landscape with ideologically driven narratives, distinguishing themselves from other forms of political communication such as rallies or television. The study underscores the role of political posters in shaping public perception and national identity through visual discourse. It also contributes to broader discussions on semiotics, political branding, and the linguistic landscape in Tanzania. Future research could investigate public reception and the evolution of political poster strategies in digital spaces.

In teaching multimodal communication to undergraduate biological engineering majors, we noticed that students often prioritized innovation over people when engaging in the technological design process. As a result, the instructors introduced service design methodology and provided instruction to put people more at the forefront of students’ minds and designs. Student teams produced 1-minute videos demonstrating how their designs worked to solve a problem for the benefit of people, and one team’s video is investigated here within a multimodal (inter)action analysis (MIA) framework. We sought to determine if MIA could help communication instructors see evidence that students integrated service design into their design process as well as whether students’ use of engineering languages enabled and empowered their participation as engineers. In analyzing the video, we claim that the video not only represents but also enacts an interaction between targeted users – who are real people – and students as newly formed engineers. Ultimately, we argue that MIA also helps teachers to see and to appreciate the actual interaction of real people and practicing engineers in the technological development process.

Representing motion in static images is a challenge due to the limitations of two-dimensional visual media. Such motion depictions are common in visual narratives, yet no studies have extensively analyzed their properties. This study examines how lexicalized visual cues contribute to motion events by analyzing 315 comics across three studies. Study 1 focuses on the frequency of motion cues and path segments, revealing that midpoints of paths were depicted more frequently than endpoints or starting points, consistent with prior corpus findings. Study 2 then explores how different cues relate to the explicitness of direction, manner of speed, and temporality. While most cues were associated with explicit paths, others, like partial repetition of postures, were more implicit. Also, backfixing and suppletion lines showed no positive relationship with any kind of paths but related to speed of motion. Cues that rely on indexicality also related to implied moments of action. Finally, Study 3 used Principal Component Analysis to uncover broader patterns in the data, revealing more nuanced groupings of properties of motion events than a binary explicit/implicit distinction. Overall, this study offers new insights into the ways static images convey dynamic information by showing they are systematized in a visual vocabulary.

This study employs a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) to investigate the construction of hybrid identities by self-proclaimed female Hong Kong PhD students on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book). Analysing a collection of 40 posts from two prominent accounts, this paper examines how these individuals strategically blend semiotic resources to navigate the tensions between academic authenticity, postfeminist empowerment, and commercial promotion. The analysis identifies three core and interwoven identity categories: a professional sharing identity, which leverages institutional prestige and application expertise; a reflection sharing identity, which brokers gender stereotypes and promotes individual resilience; and a daily life sharing identity, which curates an idealised work-life equilibrium. It is argued that through the multimodal orchestration of these identities, using visual proof, empowering narratives, and synthetic personalisation, these posters naturalise their role as service promoters. This process effectively commodifies the academic persona, co-opting postfeminist discourses of choice and empowerment into a soft-selling strategy for educational consultancy. The findings illuminate a sophisticated mechanism of ideological manipulation within China’s platform economy, where resistant discourse is transformed into a marketable commodity, thereby contributing to critical understandings of the marketisation of higher education and the constraints on female empowerment in digital spaces.

During the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, professors at a university in Canada were invited to fill-out a questionnaire inquiring about the role of body language in their lectures. Participants were asked to view body language in its largest sense, from facial expressions to hand gestures, eye movements, postures. The aim of this study was to investigate the way professors of different disciplines who were not used to classes held online perceived their body language to contribute to their teaching in the promotion of students’ learning at a moment in time when they could better relate to the differences between teaching in two class formats. This article examines the responses that 58 professors offered to the questionnaire, where the most important finding not only indicates that professors perceived their body language to make a salient contribution to their teaching, but also that this was the case especially during in-person classes.