Multimodal Communication Practice in Nigeria's Digital Space

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-61
Author(s):  
Simon Shachia Oryila ◽  
Philip Chike Chukwunonso Aghadiuno
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Multimodal Communication ◽  
Multimodal Texts ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
Communicative Acts ◽  
Communication Practice ◽  
Digital Space ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Business Opportunities

For centuries, people have evolved novel ways of making meaning. With the passage of time, the various traditional modes of representation or meaning making have been altered and, in some cases, refined or displaced by technological advancements. In Nigeria, a growing academic interest seeks to explore the practical relevance of integrating semiotic resources, such as speech, writing, video, music, colours, or signs to create multimodal texts across a wide range of communicative acts. This chapter, therefore, examines multimodal communication practice within Nigeria's digital space, its nature, dimension, as well as how digital technologies are appropriated to enhance, not just the people's digital experience, but also create social, economic, and business opportunities for Nigeria's growing population of digital natives.

Multimodal Literacy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathy A. Mills ◽  
Len Unsworth
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Digital Images ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Mobile Technologies ◽  
Language And Literacy ◽  
Multimodal Literacy ◽  
Multimodal Texts ◽  
Making Meaning

Multimodal literacy is a term that originates in social semiotics, and refers to the study of language that combines two or more modes of meaning. The related term, multimodality, refers to the constitution of multiple modes in semiosis or meaning making. Modes are defined differently across schools of thought, and the classification of modes is somewhat contested. However, from a social semiotic approach, modes are the socially and culturally shaped resources or semiotic structure for making meaning. Specific examples of modes from a social semiotic perspective include speech, gesture, written language, music, mathematical notation, drawings, photographic images, or moving digital images. Language and literacy practices have always been multimodal, because communication requires attending to diverse kinds of meanings, whether of spoken or written words, visual images, gestures, posture, movement, sound, or silence. Yet, undeniably, the affordances of people-driven digital media and textual production have given rise to an exponential increase in the circulation of multimodal texts in networked digital environments. Multimodal text production has become a central part of everyday life for many people throughout the life course, and across cultures and societies. This has been enabled by the ease of producing and sharing digital images, music, video games, apps, and other digital media via the Internet and mobile technologies. The increasing significance of multimodal literacy for communication has led to a growing body of research and theory to address the differing potentials of modes and their intermodality for making meaning. The study of multimodal literacy learning in schools and society is an emergent field of research, which begins with the important recognition that reading and writing are rarely practiced as discrete skills, but are intimately connected to the use of multimodal texts, often in digital contexts of use. The implications of multimodal literacy for pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment in education is an expanding field of multimodal research. In addition, there is a growing attention to multimodal literacy practices that are practiced in informal social contexts, from early childhood to adolescence and adulthood, such as in homes, recreational sites, communities, and workplaces.

scholarly journals Shared communicative acts in theatre texts in performance

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Anne Furlong
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Theoretic Approach ◽  
Audience Member ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
Communicative Acts ◽  
Theatrical Performances ◽  
Multiple Audiences ◽  
Heiner Müller ◽  
The Relationship

This paper adopts a relevance theoretic approach to meaning making in theatrical texts and performances. Text-based theatrical performances are collaborative creative events, many of whose participants may never engage directly with an audience member, but all of whom are engaged in making and conveying meaning. Such texts communicate immediately to multiple audiences: readers, actors, directors, producers, and designers. They communicate less directly to the writer’s ultimate audience – the playgoer or spectator – through the medium of performance. But playgoers are not passive receptacles for interpretations distilled in rehearsal, enacted through performance, or developed in study and reflection. Rather, in the framework of communication postulated by relevance theory, the audience is an active participant in making meaning. I will briefly review a range of approaches to meaning making in theatre, and then outline my view of a relevance theoretic account of theatre texts and performances as related but distinct communicative acts. For Weimann (1992), discussing the German playwright, Heiner Müller, “language is first and foremost material with which the audience is expected to work so as to make and explore their own ‘experiences’” (p. 958). By contrast, T. S. Eliot characterised performances as ‘interruptions’ of the relationship between writer and audience; in ‘a true acting play’, he asserted, the actor added nothing (Eliot, 1924, p. 96). Campbell (1981) argues that “the theatre cannot gear its production to actual audiences”, as only the “finest and most appreciative of abstract audiences for that play” (p. 152) can properly grasp its meaning. For him, the disparate capacities, views, and expectations of a given audience present a profound challenge to theatre as communication. Connor (1999) addresses the same issue, pointing out that if readers can disagree about the meaning of a text, then spectators are even less likely to agree on what a given performance means (p. 417). Unlike Campbell, however, she regards this diversity as enriching, concluding that meanings “develop from co-production with spectators as subjects” (p. 426). Relevance theory provides a framework in which to begin to disentangle the overlapping and interacting, but equally vital, contributions of writer, company, and audience in making meanings.  

scholarly journals Intersubjectivity: Conceptual Considerations in Meaning-Making With a Clinical Illustration

2022 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Harrison ◽  
Ed Tronick
Keyword(s):  
Young Child ◽  
Dynamic System ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
The Body ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
Autistic Spectrum ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Clinical Illustration

This manuscript explores intersubjectivity through a conceptual construct for meaning-making that emphasizes three major interrelated elements–meaning making in interaction, making meaning with the body as well as the mind, and meaning making within an open dynamic system. These three elements are present in the literature on intersubjectivity with a wide range of terms used to describe various theoretical formulations. One objective of this manuscript is to illustrate how such a construct can be useful to understand the meaning-making observed in psychoanalysis, such as in the treatment of a young child on the autistic spectrum. The challenges in establishing an intersubjective state with a child on the autistic spectrum serve to highlight important features of intersubjectivity. As an important background to this clinical illustration, we illustrate the construct with the scientific paradigm of the well-known face-to-face still-face.

scholarly journals On the Issue of Reading Multimodal Texts

2021 ◽  
Vol X (1) ◽  
pp. 83-104
Author(s):  
Roma Kriaučiūnienė ◽  
◽  
Paulė Papaurėlytė ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Language Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Main Idea ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Multimodal Texts ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
Survey Results ◽  
Online Texts ◽  
Online Sources

Most of our reading practices have moved from print-based to online texts, which integrate not only linguistic expression but various images, sounds, other meaning making elements, therefore the reader's engagement with the text has changed as well. While reading multimodal texts, the reader has to construct the meaning out of different modes of representation. The complexity of such texts and the way the second language learners read and construct their meaning are important for educators. Thus, the article aims at revealing the readers' viewpoints of reading multimodal texts by evaluating language users’ practices of reading print and online texts and determining their own participation and self-expression on social websites. The survey results demonstrated that readers mostly get news from online sources on the Internet, they also listen to the radio, and read the print version of news too. The research results confirmed that the text layout causes changes in reading habits and may raise difficulties in getting the main idea, grasping the meaning of images. While reading multimodal texts, the research participants prefer to stay passive and as social media users they remain not very active as well.

Reading Beyond the Code

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Communicative Acts ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Code Model ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Central Claim

This book explores the value for literary studies of relevance theory, an inferential approach to communication in which the expression and recognition of intentions plays a major role. Drawing on a wide range of examples from lyric poetry and the novel, nine of the ten chapters are written by literary specialists and use relevance theory both as an overall framework and as a resource for detailed analysis. The final chapter, written by the co-founder of relevance theory, reviews the issues addressed by the volume and explores their implications for cognitive theories of how communicative acts are interpreted in context. Originally designed to explain how people understand each other in everyday face-to-face exchanges, relevance theory—described in an early review by a literary scholar as ‘the makings of a radically new theory of communication, the first since Aristotle’s’—sheds light on the whole spectrum of human modes of communication, including literature in the broadest sense. Reading Beyond the Code is unique in using relevance theory as a prime resource for literary study, and is also the first to apply the model to a range of phenomena widely seen as supporting an ‘embodied’ conception of cognition and language where sensorimotor processes play a key role. This broadened perspective serves to enhance the value for literary studies of the central claim of relevance theory: that the ‘code model’ is fundamentally inadequate to account for human communication, and in particular for the modes of communication that are proper to literature.

Searching and Making Meaning of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Perspectives of African Immigrants in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 002216782110224
Author(s):  
Angela U. Ekwonye ◽  
Nina Truong
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Care Providers ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Democratic Republic Of Congo ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
African Immigrants ◽  
The United States ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
The Impact

African immigrants continue to be disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is unclear how they are searching for and finding meaning in the face of this adversity. This study sought to understand how African immigrants in the United States are searching for and making meaning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted in-depth interviews remotely with 20 immigrants from West Africa (Nigeria and Ghana), East Africa (Somali and Rwanda), and Central Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo). The meaning-making model was used as a framework to understand the processes of coping during a significant, adverse life event. The study found that some participants attempted to reduce the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their global meaning by seeking answers as to why the pandemic occurred and creating positive illusions. Some redefined their priorities and reframed the pandemic in a positive light. Participants found meaning in the form of accepting the pandemic as a reality of life, appreciating events previously taken for granted, and making positive changes in their lives. This study’s findings can inform health care providers of the meaning-making processes of African immigrants’ and the need to assist them in their search for meaning.

scholarly journals Autoethnography: Writing Lives and Telling Stories

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Bal Chandra Luitel ◽  
Niroj Dahal
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Teacher Education ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Climate Change Education ◽  
Narrative Representations ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Social Theories

Autoethnography covers a wide range of narrative representations, thereby bridging the gap of the boundaries by expressing autoethnographers’ painful and gainful lived experiences. These representations arise from local stories, vignettes, dialogues, and role plays by unfolding action, reaction, and interaction in the form of self-narration. Likewise, the autoethnographic texts must exhibit the autoethnographers’ critical reflections on the overall process of the inquiry. These exhibitions shall alert the autoethnographers’ research ethics, reflexivity, alternative modes of representation, inquiry, and storytelling. The original articles in this issue that rises from the domain of critical social theories within the various ranges of theoretical perspectives include journeying through informing, reforming, and transforming teacher education; critical ethnographic research tradition; a critical and political reading of the excerpts of myths; climate change education and its interface with indigenous knowledge and general traits of the participants as transformed teachers.

scholarly journals Show or Tell? Teaching with language outperforms demonstration but only when context is shared

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore Sumers ◽  
Mark K Ho ◽  
Robert Hawkins ◽  
Tom Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
High Fidelity ◽  
Linguistic Communication ◽  
Communicative Acts ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
High Bandwidth ◽  
Abstract Language ◽  
Shared Context

People use a wide range of communicative acts, from concrete demonstrations to abstract language. What are the strengths and weaknesses of such different modalities? We present a series of real-time, multi-player experiments asking participants to teach (Boolean) concepts using either demonstrations or language. Our first experiment (N = 454) manipulated the complexity of the concept, finding that linguistic (but not demonstrative) teaching enables high-fidelity transmission of more complex concepts. Why, then, do humans use both demonstrations and language? As a form of conventionalized communication, language relies on shared context between speaker and listener, whereas demonstrations are inherently grounded in the world. We hypothesized linguistic communication would be more sensitive to perturbations of shared context than demonstrations. Our second experiment (N = 568) manipulated teachers’ ability to see the features that defined the concept. This restriction severely impaired linguistic (but not demonstrative) teaching. Our comparative approach confirms language relies on shared context to permit high bandwidth communication; in contrast, demonstrations are lower-bandwidth but more robust.

scholarly journals Psychology, Meaning Making, and the Study of Worldviews

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Taves ◽  
Egil Asprem ◽  
Elliott Daniel Ihm
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Evolutionary Perspective ◽  
Cognitive Level ◽  
Multidisciplinary Study ◽  
Human Ability ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Ways Of Life

To get beyond the solely negative identities signaled by atheism and agnosticism, we have to conceptualize an object of study that includes religions and non-religions. We advocate a shift from “religions” to “worldviews” and define worldviews in terms of the human ability to ask and reflect on “big questions” ([BQs], e.g., what exists? how should we live?). From a worldviews perspective, atheism, agnosticism, and theism are competing claims about one feature of reality and can be combined with various answers to the BQs to generate a wide range of worldviews. To lay a foundation for the multidisciplinary study of worldviews that includes psychology and other sciences, we ground them in humans’ evolved world-making capacities. Conceptualizing worldviews in this way allows us to identify, refine, and connect concepts that are appropriate to different levels of analysis. We argue that the language of enacted and articulated worldviews (for humans) and world-making and ways of life (for humans and other animals) is appropriate at the level of persons or organisms and the language of sense making, schemas, and meaning frameworks is appropriate at the cognitive level (for humans and other animals). Viewing the meaning making processes that enable humans to generate worldviews from an evolutionary perspective allows us to raise news questions for psychology with particular relevance for the study of nonreligious worldviews.

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