Exploring Intercultural Interaction: The Use of Semiotic Resources in Meaning-Making Processes

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nur Nabilah Abdullah ◽  
◽  
Rafidah Sahar ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Action ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Eye Gaze ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Nonverbal Cues ◽  
Context Word ◽  
Intercultural Interaction ◽  
Semiotic Resources ◽  
Word Search ◽  
Cultural Origins

Intercultural communication refers to interaction between speakers of different backgrounds, such as different linguistic and cultural origins (Kim 2001). Interaction in face-to face situations has demonstrated that spoken language involves both verbal and semiotic resources for social action. Semiotic resources that include use of talk, gestures, eye gaze and other nonverbal cues can convey semantic content and can become a crucial point in conversation (Hazel et al. 2014). Drawing on a Aonversation Analysis (CA) approach, we explore how participants employed semiotic resources in word searches activities in an intercultural context. Word searches are moments in interaction when a speaker’s turn is temporarily ceased as the speaker displays difficulty in searching for appropriate linguistic items so as to formulate the talk (Schegloff et al. 1977; Kurhila 2006). In this study, naturally occurring interactions in a multilingual setting were video recorded. The participants were Asian university students with different language backgrounds. The findings suggest that multilingual participants mutually collaborate by utilizing verbal affordances, gaze, gesture and other nonverbal cues as useful semiotic resources in the meaning-making process, and thus resolving word search impediments to facilitate intercultural interaction.

scholarly journals The Kinematics of Social Action: Visual Signals Provide Cues for What Interlocutors Do in Conversation

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 996
Author(s):  
James P. Trujillo ◽  
Judith Holler
Keyword(s):  
Social Action ◽  
Motion Tracking ◽  
Time Window ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Visual Signals ◽  
Manual Annotation ◽  
Conversational Interaction ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Social Actions ◽  
Rapid Processing

During natural conversation, people must quickly understand the meaning of what the other speaker is saying. This concerns not just the semantic content of an utterance, but also the social action (i.e., what the utterance is doing—requesting information, offering, evaluating, checking mutual understanding, etc.) that the utterance is performing. The multimodal nature of human language raises the question of whether visual signals may contribute to the rapid processing of such social actions. However, while previous research has shown that how we move reveals the intentions underlying instrumental actions, we do not know whether the intentions underlying fine-grained social actions in conversation are also revealed in our bodily movements. Using a corpus of dyadic conversations combined with manual annotation and motion tracking, we analyzed the kinematics of the torso, head, and hands during the asking of questions. Manual annotation categorized these questions into six more fine-grained social action types (i.e., request for information, other-initiated repair, understanding check, stance or sentiment, self-directed, active participation). We demonstrate, for the first time, that the kinematics of the torso, head and hands differ between some of these different social action categories based on a 900 ms time window that captures movements starting slightly prior to or within 600 ms after utterance onset. These results provide novel insights into the extent to which our intentions shape the way that we move, and provide new avenues for understanding how this phenomenon may facilitate the fast communication of meaning in conversational interaction, social action, and conversation.

scholarly journals Interactional role shift as communicative project in student teachers’ oral presentations

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Christensson
Keyword(s):  
Student Teachers ◽  
Student Teacher ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Analytical Approach ◽  
Academic Development ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Semiotic Resources ◽  
Role Shift ◽  
Oral Presentations

AbstractFocusing 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.

scholarly journals Nexus analysis in the study of the changing field of language learning, language pedagogy and language teacher education

2018 ◽  
pp. 71-92
Author(s):  
Leena Kuure ◽  
Maritta Riekki ◽  
Riikka Tumelius
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Full Spectrum ◽  
Language Teacher Education ◽  
Language Teacher ◽  
Language Pedagogy ◽  
Mediated Discourse ◽  
Nexus Analysis

Nexus analysis is becoming increasingly employed in a variety of research fields. It is seen to be particularly suited to exploring complex and changing phenomena. It entails a mediated discourse perspective to social action and interaction. In discourse studies, this involves switching the perspective from language to social semiotic meaning making in its full spectrum not only here and now but at the same time reaching across more distant spatial and temporal orientations. As the tradition of nexus analysis is still young there are no established interpretations of how to conduct research with an interest in such complexities in flux. This paper presents a review of studies in which nexus analysis or mediated discourse analysis has been applied in research related to language pedagogy and language teacher education. The review shows how research in the field is in emergence and the interpretations concerning the theoretical-methodological underpinnings vary to some extent.

scholarly journals The Power of Voice: Using Audio Podcasts to Teach Vocal Performance and Digital Communication

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 38-50
Author(s):  
Amanda Hill
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Digital Communication ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Specific Aspect ◽  
Nonverbal Cues ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Vocal Performance ◽  
Nonverbal Behaviors ◽  
Group Project

Today’s students often speak through mediated technologies. Thus, understanding how nonverbal cues impact meaning-making is key to understanding effective communication across mediums. This case study explores a group project where students created audio podcasts to teach others about a specific aspect of communication studies while considering the way sound and vocal performance affect the transference of the message. This article examines the use of audio podcasts as a vehicle for teaching university students about the power of paralinguistic and chronemic nonverbal behaviors.

Beyond Anne Frank

2019 ◽  
pp. 69-92
Author(s):  
Ritu Radhakrishnan
Keyword(s):  
Critical Literacy ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Integrated Curriculum ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Multiple Modalities ◽  
Meaningful Experiences ◽  
Anne Frank

This chapter addresses the ways in which aesthetic practices provide educators at all levels and across disciplines with practical tools for enhancing critical literacy in pursuit of responsible citizenship. Engaging with aesthetics allows students to create meaning-making experiences and explore their own thinking about a topic and provides students with an opportunity to create meaningful experiences to address social action. Sharing of these processes and creations is often less polarizing than dialogues or debates and allows for inclusion of students with multiple modalities and talents. This curricular approach is more than simply creating an arts-integrated curriculum. Students should be creating, critiquing, and engaging with various forms of aesthetics (e.g. visual, drama, dance, music, etc.).

Toward a Rhetoric of Serious Game Genres

2010 ◽  
pp. 50-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Sherlock
Keyword(s):  
Social Action ◽  
Serious Games ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Serious Game ◽  
Genre Studies ◽  
Rhetorical Genre ◽  
Gaming Activity ◽  
Game Developers ◽  
Research And Design

This chapter examines the construction of serious game genre frameworks from a rhetorical perspective. The author argues that to understand the forms of persuasion, learning, and social action that serious games facilitate, perspectives on genre must be developed and applied that situate serious gaming activity within larger systems of discourse, meaning-making, and text circulation. The current disconnect between popular understandings of serious game genres and those expressed by serious game developers represents one instance where rhetorical genre studies can be applied to generate knowledge about the “genre work” that serious games perform. Advocating a notion of genre that seeks to identify forms of social action and the persuasive possibility spaces of gaming, the author concludes by synthesizing digital game-based formulations of genre with perspectives from rhetorical theory to suggest implications for serious game research and design.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Kosstrin
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Ashkenazi Jews ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
Gender Presentation

The Introduction establishes Anna Sokolow’s choreography among revolutionary spectatorial currents of the 1930s international Left as it aligned with Jewish peoplehood and shows how these values remained present through Sokolow’s career. It positions Sokolow’s choreography within leftist transnationalism; it methodologically renders her dancing body from archival evidence through discourse analysis to ground the book’s discussion; and it defines Jewish cultural and aesthetic elements in Sokolow’s work to explain how her dances’ Jewish signifiers engendered their meaning-making processes. Arguing that Ashkenazi Jewishness undergirds Sokolow’s choreography, the Introduction shows how communism, revolutionary modernism, gender presentation, and social action in Sokolow’s dances were part of Sokolow’s milieu as a member of the “second generation” of American Ashkenazi Jews. Sokolow’s professional arc from Martha Graham dancer and proletarian choreographer to established midcentury modernist dancemaker reflects the assimilation of her generation from the marginalized working class to the American mainstream.

scholarly journals Using systemic functional linguistics to explore digital technologies in educational contexts

2013 ◽  
Vol 33 (4-5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Coffin
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Online Discussion ◽  
Systemic Functional Linguistics ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Discussion Forums ◽  
Functional Linguistics ◽  
Online Discussion Forums ◽  
Semiotic Resources ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
Educational Argumentation

AbstractOver the last decade, technological innovation has led to new pedagogic sites, such as online discussion forums and virtual 3D worlds. In these sites students and teachers use language and other meaning-making resources to engage in educational argumentation. However, there have been few studies which have systematically explored the role of lexicogrammatical and other semiotic resources in the making of meaning in these contexts. This is because the main body of research underpinning claims around the affordances and limits of online argumentation is located within sociocognitive paradigms. By drawing on the tools of systemic functional linguistics and, where relevant, systemic functional-multimodal analysis, this article therefore offers a fresh perspective. I show how such tools can illuminate both the overarching textual shape and structure of online discussion forums and the ways in which meanings are made through language and other semiotic resources.

scholarly journals Exploring game grammars: a sociosemiotic account of young people’s game-making practices

2021 ◽  
pp. 147035722110272
Author(s):  
Bruno De Paula
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Semiotic Resources ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
The Relationship

This article investigates the relationship between young people’s game-making practices and meaning-making in videogames. By exploring two different games produced in a game-making club in London through a multimodal sociosemiotic approach, the author discusses how semiotic resources and modes were recruited by participants to realize different discourses. By employing concepts such as modality truth claims and grammar, he examines how these games help us reflect on the links between intertextuality, hegemonic gaming forms and sign-making through digital games. He also outlines how a broader approach to what has been recently defined as the ‘procedural’ mode by Hawreliak in Multimodal Semiotics and Rhetoric in Videogames (2018) can be relevant for promoting different and more democratic forms of meaning-making through videogames.

Analyzing the talking book Imagine a world: A multimodal approach to English language learning in a multilingual context

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (6) ◽  
pp. 747-774
Author(s):  
Heather Lotherington ◽  
Sabine Tan ◽  
Kay L. O’Halloran ◽  
Peter Wignell ◽  
Andrew Schmitt
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
English Language ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Linguistically Diverse ◽  
English Language Teaching ◽  
Linguistically Diverse Students ◽  
Multimodal Analysis ◽  
Professional Interest ◽  
Semiotic Resources

Abstract In recent years there has been increased academic and professional interest and awareness in approaches to English language teaching (ELT) that take a plurilingual approach. This is often combined with a multimodal stance. The outcome of this combination is an approach to English language teaching that integrates multiple languages and multiple semiotic resources. This paper examines how a plurilingual approach to ELT can be viewed through a multimodal lens by analyzing the construction of a plurilingual talking book created as a student project in an elementary public school. The analysis uses multimodal analysis software to map the interaction of languages and images, in order to determine how these function as meaning-making resources in a multimodal, multiple-language text created by linguistically diverse students with high ELT needs. The findings indicate how combinations of different semiotic resources work together to create meaning, delineates the role of English in meaning-making, and illustrates the children’s multilingual interactions in the creation of their collaboratively composed multimodal talking book.

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