A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, School of Education, University of the Witwatersrand. Johannesburg, Hune 2017. / In this study, the affordances of a multimodal pedagogy for teaching the prescribed novel,
Lord of the Flies, are investigated. The research site is a Grade 10 Visual Art classroom,
with six learners serving as the core group. It involves a five-week teaching intervention,
whereby participants are required to re-design or re-semiotise a particular scene from the
novel into a comic book, or any multimodal narrative that includes both written and visual
textual features. Participants’ works are analysed in terms of their modal features − size,
shape, colour, contour, texture, written text and overall design − and their semiotic
relationship to the original, print-based novel. Finally, the researcher determines which textrelated
meanings or interpretations are gained, lost or transformed during this process of resemiotisation,
and discusses the possible implications of these for classroom practice.
This research may be described as classroom ethnography (Bloome, 2012) within the
qualitative paradigm, offering an account of participants’ actions in a real-life, everyday
context. Data is collected through ethnographic techniques such as field notes, diary entries,
artefact collection and, most crucially, interviews which are conducted before and after the
re-semiotisation process. To analyse this data, the researcher draws extensively from
literature in the fields of multimodality and social semiotics, particularly the seminal works of
Kress (1993; 2000; 2005), Newfield (2009; 2014) and The New London Group (1996).
Emphasis is placed on how participants use semiotic resources − in this case, materials
acquired in the classroom, from the internet or other domains − to re-shape written texts so
that they become more meaningful and accessible for learning.
Finally, the findings chapter presents the multimodal pedagogy as a useful outlet for
learners’ “own desires, fantasies and interests in the semiotic chain” (Stein, 2003, p. 115).
Since participants are positioned centrally within the semiotic space, they can become selfregulated
and active agents of meaning making − discovering a canonical text’s themes,
symbols, character relations or other sub-textual nuances in and through the visual mode. In
the interests of continued research and application in the classroom, a label method is
suggested to both track participants’ gains and losses in meaning − upon completion of the
entire process − and to determine their level of engagement with the novel’s content. This
involves presenting each learner’s artefacts visually, with several labels pointing to the
features that speak back most clearly to the source text.
Keywords: ● multimodal pedagogy ● social semiotics ● re-semiotisation ● chain of
semiosis / meaning-making ● visual and written modes ● literature teaching and learning / LG2018
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/25455 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | De Jager, Nicholas |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | Online resource (202 leaves), application/pdf, application/pdf |
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