This thesis uses a multimodal approach to explore how three lower primary teachers manage dialogic space in their respective classrooms during the Shared Book Approach (SBA) lessons, where they read big books to their students while holding whole class discussions. Against the backdrop of recent policies and initiatives by Ministry of Education, Singapore and the aims of the 2010 English Language Syllabus, interactions between teacher and students have received much attention. The body of work on classroom discourse in Singapore mostly focuses on speech, to the exclusion of other semiotic resources that make meaning in the classroom. This study finds that during SBA lessons in the lower primary, teachers use a variety of other semiotic resources such as gestures, space, written words and images. Through a detailed consideration of these semiotic resources, the aims of this research are to investigate how three teachers manage dialogic space during whole class discussions in SBA lessons, the issues arising from their practice and insights specifically given by the use of the Systemic Functional - Multimodal Discourse Analysis or SF-MDA (O’Halloran, 2007, 2011) adopted in this study. The employment of the SF-MDA has proven to be productive in establishing the way the teachers combine the different semiotic resources of speech and gesture to expand dialogic space by asking open-ended questions while gesturing with the supine hand position; and contracting dialogic space by, for example, asking seemingly open-ended questions while pointing to the answers in the big books. This could be seen as a scaffolding technique in reducing the options available to students. Teachers are found to be less reliant on the prone hand gesture in contracting dialogic space.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:757539 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Amasha, Siti Azlinda |
| Publisher | University of Nottingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/52273/ |
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