Social-semiotic analysis for content description in multimodal educational texts

Abstract

In contemporary education, there are various tendencies toward multimodality. Understood as the syncretism of different forms of expression in which the content plane manifests itself. The languages used in the various levels of education are becoming multiple and interconnected. Indeed, many educators want to make teaching practices open to the multiplicity of languages to support the diverse competencies of students. And this is even more pertinent in educational contexts related to the study of the arts.

It is thus necessary to understand the rich dynamics of meaning that this wealth of languages can trigger. For this, methodological tools are often inadequate and not up to the complexity of the content generated.

We would like to question how social-semiotics can present itself as a methodology for describing the content plan of educational texts. Especially when this content manifests itself through a complex plurality of expressive substances. We want to observe how a socio-semiotic analysis can describe the dynamics of signification in an educational activity. In which verbal, visual, gestural, and sound languages can coexist.

To achieve this, we will present the results of a socio-semiotic analysis of an educational experience. Which integrates the tools provided by Greimas' semiotics with those of various discourse studies. We will look at a workshop conducted as part of an educator training course. They were asked to interpret, in a guided manner, an image also using non-verbal languages.

The semiotic analysis will allow us to describe this specific dynamic of meaning production manifested through this multiplicity of forms of expression.