College disability support offices as advertisements: A multimodal discourse analysis

2020 ◽  
pp. 146144562096692
Author(s):  
So Yoon Kim

This study examined the disability support offices (DSOs) websites of twelve US higher education institutions (HEIs) anchored in multimodal discourse analysis and genre analysis to examine how semiotic resources are deployed to describe DSO services on their websites and to determine the discursive functions of advertisement they perform. The DSO websites were within four clicks from HEI homepages but had inconsistent navigation paths, making it difficult to reach DSO websites. DSO websites were foregrounding promoting and branding the institutions rather than presenting the information about the services offered. This is achieved by using multimodal promotional rhetoric such as: (a) situating accessibility as central commodifiable attribute, (b) promoting the value of accessibility, (c) establishing the superiority of the institution, (d) constructing images of students with disabilities as empowered but dependent upon the DSO, and (e) situating students within a college community. Implications for DSO websites functioning as advertisements are also discussed.

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez ◽  
Noelia Ruiz-Madrid

AbstractHumor is present in most instances of human to human interaction and has often been studied by discourse analysis (Long and Graesser 2009). These studies have taken several perspectives but have often ignored the multimodal aspect of humor even more if the genres selected have been in oral academic discourse. In this paper we focus on a genre that has rarely been studied, the conference plenary lecture. Taking as a theoretical model Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) we look at the semiotic resources employed by two senior researchers: one Spanish, Dr. Jose Manuel Blecua and one British, Dr David Crystal. They were plenary speakers in two different conferences. In their speeches Dr. Blecua dealt with Spanish as a Foreign language and Dr. Crystal with English as a Foreign language. Although there does not seem to have been any point of contact between them, their lectures show a number of similarities especially with regard to the semiotic resources they use in order to produce humor.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Haili Feng

Lim (2019) states that one challenge for the researchers in multimodal discourse analysis is to describe and discuss the interplay across various semiotic resources. English micro-lectures, as a kind of popular and widespread teaching materials in the information age, are typical multimodal discourses involving multi-semiotic resources. This article adopts the systemic-functional synthetic framework for multimodal discourse analysis from Zhang Delu (2018) to explore the relationship of various modes involved in excellent English micro-lectures and further examine how the semiotic resources cooperate and interact to construct communicative meaning. By analyzing and interpreting the context of culture, the meaning, the lexico-grammar, the media and the substance systems of involved modes in micro-lectures, it proves that English micro-lectures demonstrate complicated intersemiosis and various modes cooperate in a perfect way in meaning construction. This comprehensive investigation of semiotic systems sheds light on teachers’ mode choice and teaching design in producing micro-lectures and students’ learning strategies of micro-lectures in the mobile-assisted learning environment.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 616
Author(s):  
Rizki Ananda ◽  
Siti Sarah Fitriani ◽  
Iskandar Abdul Samad ◽  
Andi Anto Patak

Drawing on a multimodality theory, this study attempted to investigate the various semiotic resources utilized by a giant Indonesian cigarette company, Sampoerna, and explore how these resources communicate meanings or messages in its billboard advertisements to persuade its potential customers to buy the product. The data were analyzed using Halliday’s systemic functional grammar focusing on ideational meta-function or also known as a representational function in multimodal discourse analysis. The findings revealed that the billboard advertisements were designed to persuade the audience to buy the advertised products implicitly through representational functions attained using narrative and conceptual processes. Whereas the former was realized by employing its typical sub-processes, actional and reactional processes, the latter employed its sub-processes such as classificational, analytical, and symbolic processes. Implicationally, this study has illuminated the possible application of systemic functional grammar within multimodal discourse analysis domain to investigate implicit message(s) conveyed by an advertisement.


SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402110321
Author(s):  
Hesham Suleiman Alyousef

This qualitative study examined multimodal cohesive devices in English oral biology texts by eight high-achieving Saudi English-as-a-foreign-language students enrolled in a Bachelor of Science Dentistry program. A Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) of the textual and logical cohesive devices in oral biology texts was conducted, employing Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion analysis scheme. The findings showed that students used varied cohesive devices: lexical cohesion, followed by reference and conjunctions. Although ellipsis was minimally employed in the oral biology texts, its discipline-specific uses emerged: the use of bullet points and numbered lists that facilitate recall. The SF-MDA of cohesion in multimodal semiotic resources highlighted the processes underlying construction of conceptual and linguistic knowledge of cohesive devices in oral biology texts. The results indicate that oral biology discourse is interdisciplinary, including a number of subfields in biology. The SF-MDA of pictorial oral biology representations indicates that they include instances of cohesive devices that illustrate and complement verbal texts. The results indicate that undergraduate students need to be provided with a variety of multimodal high-cohesion texts so that they can successfully extend underlying conceptual and logical meaning-making relations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Marino

AbstractThis 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”.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942110032
Author(s):  
Beatriz Carbajal-Carrera

Heroic narratives are often biased towards a conceptualization of the rural/urban difference that positions rural identities at the margins. In particular, superhero stories have traditionally offered a vision of heroism assumed to be male, urban and young. How can post-rural contexts shaped by migration contest these narrative patterns? This article examines the street narrative of Fenómenas do rural, which recognizes older female rural identities and casts them as superheroines. Through a multimodal discourse analysis, I examine its contestation of heroic patterns, its recognition of older female rural identities and its creation of affiliation opportunities for the Galician community. I argue that this narrative stands as a reflection of the rurban (rural + urban) and the glocal (global + local) elements that subverts pre-existing canons in the superhero and the meiga (‘witch’) mythology imaginaries.


Author(s):  
Shuting Cao ◽  
Rui Chen ◽  
Haiyuan Liu ◽  
Ruolin Shi

The main goal of college English education is to cultivate the students’ language ability of listening, speaking, reading and writing, and to promote the formation of individualized learning and autonomous ability of college students. At present, the new curriculum reform in our country has put forward a new educational requirement to college English teaching, which requires the innovation of college English teaching idea, and under the background of the development of new media, it proposes to use new media equipment to carry out teaching activities. However, college English education in our country is influenced by examination-oriented education mode, and the traditional education method is still used, which is not good for college students to improve their comprehensive quality of English. In view of this development situation, the Ministry of Education of China Based on the development of new media, a multimodal discourse analysis approach to college English education is proposed to enhance the level of College English teaching.


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