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Analysing the Construction of Modal Configurations with Mediating Digital Texts in the Classroom

  • Jonathon Adams

    Jonathon has been working at the English Language Institute of Singapore, Ministry of Education, since 2013. His main area of work involves providing support for learning in different school subjects through classroom-based research and developing resources. He has worked in educational institutions from secondary to university level in the UK and Japan. He has studied applied linguistics at Macquarie University, Australia (PGCLR, MA), and Lancaster University, in the UK (MRes, PhD).Jonathon’s research draws on systemic functional linguistics, MIA and mediated discourse analysis to investigate the construction of multimodal meanings made with mediating digital texts. He employs microethnographic approaches with digital methods to analyse classroom discourse.

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Published/Copyright: May 27, 2015

Abstract

With digital texts being employed in classrooms, the construction and content of communication need to be examined to understand implications for classroom pedagogies and the development of new communicative practices. The study employs a multimodal interaction analysis (MIA) framework (Norris 2004) to carry out a microethnographic analysis of digital literacy events of first-year university students in a Japanese university explaining online stories. The data captured are analysed to reveal how meanings are multimodally constructed in relation to elements and features of the mediating digital texts. The analyses showed that specific “modal configurations” (Norris 2009) such as spoken language, gesture and gaze appeared to be shaped by the visual meanings in the mediating texts. The spoken meanings were also focussed directly on what was visually present in the texts, further demonstrating the impact of the visual nature of the texts in shaping meanings made in the digital literacy events.

About the author

Jonathon Adams

Jonathon has been working at the English Language Institute of Singapore, Ministry of Education, since 2013. His main area of work involves providing support for learning in different school subjects through classroom-based research and developing resources. He has worked in educational institutions from secondary to university level in the UK and Japan. He has studied applied linguistics at Macquarie University, Australia (PGCLR, MA), and Lancaster University, in the UK (MRes, PhD).Jonathon’s research draws on systemic functional linguistics, MIA and mediated discourse analysis to investigate the construction of multimodal meanings made with mediating digital texts. He employs microethnographic approaches with digital methods to analyse classroom discourse.

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Published Online: 2015-5-27
Published in Print: 2015-6-1

©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton

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