Volume 9, Issue 2

Contemporary class formations increasingly exceed language and, therefore, defy the usual word-centric, text-based approaches of discourse studies. As Bourdieu famously observed, class-sustaining enactments of distinction and taste are often enacted outside language through banal “techniques of the body” such as people’s ways of walking or ways of eating. In this vein, my paper presents a social-semiotic analysis of the particular role menus play in materializing taste, both gustatory and social. However, rather than taking the obvious tack of addressing their linguistic content or typographic design, I focus on their haptic, experiential properties; for example, their shape, size, weight, density and other textural, tactile or material features. As a critical-empirical focus, my core evidence is an archive of Business Class menus from 18 international airlines; it is here that eating practices are explicitly framed as distinctive and superior. The significance of any text cannot be properly understood by simply attending to its straightforwardly representational meanings; its sensory and sensuous materialities must be addressed too. This, I propose, is where some of the most subtle but powerful status-making happens – the seemingly harmless, throw-away moments where privilege/inequality arises, invariably obscured but assuredly naturalized.

Focusing on Swedish student teachers’ oral presentations in a rhetoric class, this article studies interactional role shift as a multimodal practice. The role shifts under scrutiny concern shifting from student teacher to teacher, thus anticipating the students’ future profession. A central feature of the article is a discussion of how role shift may be conceptualised as a communicative project, thus highlighting the different modes of communication used by the students, and consequently to examine its potential as a facilitator of students’ professional and academic development. The data was collected using an ethnographical approach, resulting in a collection of 21 video-recorded oral presentations, together with other relevant semiotic resources. The data is analysed by the employment of concepts from nexus analysis and the notion of communicative projects. Through a discourse analytical approach to social action in interaction, the analysis shows how role shifts are constructed of patterns of smaller actions that add up to three primary actions: setting the scene, changing perspective, and performing the new role. These primary actions are multimodally chained together, and the results demonstrate how social actors use instructional texts in combination with multimodal recourses in order to perform their role shifts.

Speakers in research dissemination talks are challenged with the need to connect with an audience that does not necessarily share their knowledge and expertise. This communicative situation can be particularly challenging for speakers using English both as a foreign language and for academic purposes. This study combines multimodal and ethnographic methods to explore how speakers of dissemination talks engage with their public. It focuses on four presenters’ use and combination of language, paralanguage, kinesics, proxemics and gaze during intensive moments of engagement. The results show that these interpersonal rich points consist of dense multimodal ensembles that serve to shorten the distance between presenters and their audiences. The findings suggest that a skilful orchestration of modes can be greatly beneficial to achieve the desired level of audience engagement. Therefore, developing speakers’ multimodal communicative competence should be a priority in English for specific and academic purposes (ESP/EAP) training.

This article investigates how a significant part of the learning process within show dance classes is performed, namely multimodal demonstrations. In particular, it focuses on how the mirror is used as a tool during demonstrations. The data consist of video recordings and ethnographic fieldwork among young adults practicing show dance. Three single cases undergo in-depth analysis using an EMCA (ethnomethodology conversation analysis) approach. The analysis shows that the understanding of a multimodal demonstration is watched into being and that the mirror functions as an extension of the teacher. In addition, the use of the mirror changes over the course of the ongoing demonstration. The participants agree on how to use the mirror and that there is a symmetrical order for how the mirror is used, which means that the responding participant follows the way of using (or not using) the mirror that is introduced by another participant. As such, this article contends that use of the mirror is a well-established practice. The article concludes by highlighting the positive effect on the learning situation when a mirror is used for demonstration in show dance classes.