Volume 9, Issue 1 -

This paper offers two contributions to the multimodal discourse analysis of tourism advertising videos. First it shows how Thainess has been resemiotized to be accessible to non-Thai people and second it illustrates how the mediated action can be used as a unit of analysis to analyze advertising videos. Thainess has been a national identity strategy that has evolved into numerous polysemic. In this discussion five discursive stances to Thainess are identified: Thainess as a national identity, Thainess as a form other-ness, the Thai-ification of Thai people, Thainess as popular culture, and Thainess as commodified consumption. The analysis uses an integrative framework based in mediated discourse theory, multimodal discourse analysis and social semiotics to discuss and analyze the discursive stances of Thainess that emerge in two videos from the 2015 Discover Thainess campaign. Using the mediated action as the unit of analysis the multimodal features of Thainess that emerge from these videos are analyzed. Through this analysis Thainess is shown to be resemiotized in the videos where it was once inaccessible to westerners, the Thainess represented in the videos has been resemiotized to be both accessible and authentic to western tourists.

This study aims to investigate the process of reconstruction of Māori postcolonial cultural identity in the twenty-first century which also passes through the reclamation and redefinition of ‘takatāpui’ notion. ‘Takatāpui’ is an umbrella term that nowadays indicates all the Māori with non-conforming wairua (spiritualities, gender identities), sexualities and sex characteristics. It is a culturally specific word which represents a form of intersectionality by identifying people as both Māori and queer. As a consequence of the increasing spread of the Internet, which has become a virtual place to construe identity and to promote the dissemination of ideas, a Multimodal Discourse Analysis is conducted on a corpus comprising 10 audiovisual texts fully retrieved from the web and exclusively produced by Māori takatāpui activists and/or containing Māori takatāpui activists’ self-narratives or claims. The corpus is analysed by applying a MMDA (Multimodal Discourse Analysis) framework based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s social semiotic framework (2006). The analysis is conducted also by taking into account Blommaert’s linguistic and ethnographic framework (2014). The findings of the analysis show the different strategies through which Māori identities are construed and conveyed reinforcing what the Māori scholar, Tuhiwai Smith (1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: Zed Books Limited, 28), calls “a very powerful need to give testimony to and restore a spirit, to bring back into existence a world fragmenting and dying”.

This paper explores how student teachers navigated moving between different modes of representation from written text to image. This enabled some students to play with genre conventions, rethink the relationship between word and image, and explore multimodality in interesting ways. Working at the intersection of Kress’ work on Multimodality, Newfield’s transmodal moment and the critical literacy project, I designed and implemented a course for English secondary education in one school of education in South Africa. Firstly, this article outlines the course’s aims and assessment to consider how multimodality might feature in a unit of work for student teachers. Specific focus is given to the final assessment task that required students to make a ‘transmodal shift’ from linguistic to visual-linguistic; from written narrative to multimodal storytelling. Secondly, a critical multimodal discourse analysis of students’ visual narratives is applied to explore how critical transmodality enabled some student teachers to imagine beyond traditional narrative structures and explore multimodal semiotic resources in innovative ways, relevant to the secondary English classroom. Finally, I conclude by considering the implications of multimodal semiotic play for both research and classroom practice in language and literacy education, including assessment, the value of non-linguistic modes, and genre as a construct of power.

This article examines the unfolding of interaction in a growing and, so far, scarcely examined social and cultural practice – interpreter-mediated public literary conversations. In this context, the activity of interpreters, although indispensable when authors and audiences do not share a common language, is sometimes regarded as a “necessary evil” that allegedly causes delays and information loss. Exploring an interpreter-mediated public literary conversation with Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich as a case in point, the focus of this article is rather on what the presence of an interpreter might add to the shared performance on stage. Attention is drawn to the temporal evolvement of the interlocutor’s communicative resources, evident within narrative sequences, drawing on prosody research and research on gestures. The study suggests that, apart from keeping the non-Russian speaking audience updated on content, the interpreter’s rhythmically calibrated performance adds an energizing asset to the event as a whole. The notion of the “coupled turn”, internally hosting gestural and prosodic coherence across topical boundaries and language frame shifts, emerges as a usable unit for the analysis.