Multimodal knowledge building in a Japanese secondary English as a foreign language class

Abstract

Multimodal analysis examines how different modes, such as space, gesture, and language, instantiate meaning together. In this paper, a Systemic Functional-Multimodal Discourse Analysis demonstrates how teachers enact their pedagogy with their students across modes through what is represented experientially, how relationships between people are construed interpersonally, and how coherent texts are realized textually. This paper is a preliminary study of classroom data from a larger project looking at the multimodal pedagogy of Japanese secondary school teachers of English through the paired lenses of Systemic Functional-Multimodal Discourse Analysis and Legitimation Code Theory. It demonstrates how methods from these perspectives may be productively combined. How this teacher builds cumulative knowledge multimodally can be uncovered through the analysis of pedagogic register (Rose, 2018) and exchange (Berry, 1981; Martin and Rose, 2007), as well as classroom space and representing and textual action (Amundrud, 2017; Martin and Zappavigna, 2019). How both gesture and dialogic exchange between the teacher and students modulate the contextual relation of the knowledge construed in class is also explored via semantic gravity, which looks at how closely connected knowledge practices are to their context (Maton, 2014). As a preliminary study, the paper closes with limitations and future directions for this pedagogic multimodality research.