The framework of visual grammar (Kress and van Leeuwen,
2006
, via Serafini,
2014
) is used to examine the artwork of Laurie Halse Anderson and Emily Carroll’s
Speak: The Graphic Novel,
which tells ...through words and pictures the story of Melinda Sordino, a girl who is raped just prior to beginning her freshman year in high school. Three key sets of images that depict the various dimensions of Melinda’s silence are analyzed in order to demonstrate how Carroll’s images, in conjunction with Anderson’s text, work to convey Melinda’s ongoing trauma and eventual recovery: Melinda’s artwork, the various mirrors that appear in the book, and the abandoned janitor’s closet that Melinda transforms into her private refuge. The overall purpose of the paper is not to compare the original novel with the graphic adaptation, but rather to interrogate how—and how effectively—Carroll is able to depict silence, and Melinda’s eventual triumph over silence, through the visual grammar of pictures. The paper argues that the visual grammar instructs us in how to read the images, which ultimately work to show us what Melinda cannot tell us.
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DOBA, EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, IZUM, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
•This study analyzed how L2 learners’ WTC is responsive to classroom multimodality.•Data included interviews with eight students and teachers’ PowerPoint slides.•WTC was influenced by linguistic and ...affective factors, and contextual factors.•WTC's associations with kinesthetic, auditory, and visual modalities were found.•Interactive meaning construed in two visual images with high WTC was analyzed.
This study draws on linguistic and applied linguistic approaches to analyze how second language learners’ willingness to communicate (WTC) is responsive to classroom multimodal affordances. The data reported in this paper includes three rounds of semi-structured interviews, each conducted after a classroom observation, with eight students from two intact English classes in a university in China, and Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT) slides supplied by their teachers. The findings showed that WTC was subject to the joint influence of individuals’ linguistic and affective factors and classroom contextual factors. Nuanced associations of WTC and kinesthetic, auditory, and visual modalities were also identified. The interactive meanings construed in two visual images in PPT slides reported to stimulate high WTC were analyzed using visual grammar, which yielded complementary insights. This study accentuates the need to understand WTC as embedded in classroom multimodal affordances so as to reveal the totality of students’ meaning making of classroom interaction.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Following an ethnographic approach, this study was intended to investigate how children transfer meaning in their drawings, as a manifestation of their visual literacy competence. To this end, 32 ...six- and seven-year-old Iranian male children were observed for six class sessions as they engaged in learning activities that involved drawing. Building upon Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (1996) theoretical framework of Visual Grammar, children’s drawings were analyzed. Field notes were also used to describe experiences and observations the researcher made while participating in the class. Furthermore, children’s descriptions of their own drawings were used as complementary evidence to the analysis. The results of the analyses revealed that drawing upon a variety of visual resources, such as talks, written texts, gestures, and objects, children made ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings in their drawings. Furthermore, although each drawing was uniquely created by different types of interests and provided the specific context for the visual structures and forms, some features such as use of space and line framings, diagonal lines, curved/bent figures, profile form, and tilted body position were shared by most children in their meaning-making act. The findings can help educators and practitioners promote children’s visual literacy, and propose pedagogical and practical implications.
Poster is one of the main modes of multimodal discourse and plays a very important role in film promotion. Based on the visual grammar system under the framework of meta-functional theory, this paper ...gives a multimodal discourse analysis on a poster of the movie Hi, Mom. The purpose is to interpret the reproducing meaning, interactive meaning and composition meaning of the film poster, which helps to explore the connotation and thematic meaning of the film poster discourse, so as to help people better understand the theme of the film.
The present study aims at examining the semiotic modes used in the rubrics for girls and the topics they reflect in Arab children’s magazines. To this end, eight girls’ sections were extracted from ...two Arab children’s magazines, namely Majid (active) and Hatem (non-active). We adopted Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) visual grammar in our data analysis. We focused on representational, interactive, and compositional metafunctions. The results show that although both publications used a variety of semiotic modes to express meaning, there are some differences between them. That is, Majid is richer than Hatem in terms of layout, the use of pictures, and vibrant colors. The findings also indicate that the two periodicals discuss similar topics, mainly recipes, fashion, and etiquette, but they vary in the attention given to each topic. While Majid concentrates on fashion and beauty, Hatem places much more focus on recipes and handcrafts. These results suggest that the variations in focus on specific topics could be related to the socio-economic contexts in which the two magazines are published.
يعد غلاف مجلة تيمبو المكتوبة باللغة الإندونيسية والمصدرة في 14 سبتمبر 2019 مثيرا للجدل ويؤوله بعض الأحزاب السياسية بأنه خطاب مهين للرئيس الإندونيسي جوكو ويدودو (جوكووي). ولا ينكر أحد أن ظهور غلاف ...المجلة في ذلك العدد بسبب القضية السياسية في ذلك الوقت. وهي موافقة الرئيس جوكووي على نص مشروع القانون ضد هيئة مكافحة الفساد (KPK). وبناء على هذا، تكشف هذه الدراسة عن كيفية تصوير غلاف المجلة في عددها المذكور الرئيس جوكووي؟ تأخذ هذه الدراسة بياناتها من غلاف مجلة تيمبو المصدرة في 14 سبتمبر 2019 الذي تكون من أنماط تصويرية ولغوية. وعند تحليل البيانات تستخدم مقاربة تحليل الخطاب النقدي متعدد الوسائط (MCDA) للكشف عن المعاني الأيديولوجية خلف تلك الأنماط. وتدل نتائج التحليل على أن غلاف المجلة قد صور الرئيس جوكووي تصويرا سلبيا، وقد ظهر هذا التصوير السلبي من خلال الصور الظلية في الأنماط التصويرية والتصرفات الاجتماعية المتمثلة في الأنماط اللغوية. وقد ساهمت نتائج هذه الدراسة علميا في إجابة السؤال، أأهان غلاف المجلة الرئيس الإندونيسي أم لا؟
In many countries around the world, the focus of education has seen a distinct shift from knowledge and skills equipping to the cultivation of values, attitudes and even affect. This study focuses on ...the verbal and visual representations of affect and attitude in a set of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks published in China. By analyzing the verbal and visual attitudinal meanings through the analytic lenses of appraisal theory and visual grammar respectively, the paper shows how verbal and visual resources with positive appraisal meanings are employed to foster positive affect and attitudes toward English language learning, China, and foreign cultures in the textbooks. While these verbal and visual resources echo generally concordant attitudinal meanings, some significant dissonances were also detected. For instance, tensions seem to exist between strengthening local loyalties to China while promoting a global outlook, raising standards of English language among Chinese students by appealing to Anglo-centric models of proficiency, and raising awareness of foreign cultures by invoking familiar local customs and practices. These findings hold important implications for language educators, curriculum designers and educational researchers working in the field of multimodality.
Instagram serves as a powerful instrument for youth socialization, self-expression, and self-performance in visual online spaces. Using social semiotics and multimodal discourse analysis, this study ...examines the potential ideological meanings and implications of selfie-shooting and sharing on Instagram on young adults’ self-concept. A corpus of 110 questionnaires, including almost 85 captioned selfies, was surveyed as multimodal utterances. In doing so, this study argues that selfies can create young adults’ split-selves while constructing their multiple personas in visual online spaces. This marks the significance of viewing selfie-creators not only as authors of their selfies, but rather as viewers of a three-fold self: an ideal-self, a projected-self, and an internal-self, to negotiate social and power relationships, while (re)positioning observer-observed roles. This study claims originality in unraveling how young adults use visual and textual mediated communication to represent and perform their split-selves. It suggests that selfie-shooting-sharing has become a key self-performance tactic and behavior in online cultures. Therefore, young adults deploy selfies and captions to posit a redefinition of certain social values, such as aesthetics and freedom, while deploying their selfies and captions. Challenging certain orthodox social allegiances, they conceive wildness, messiness, and exuberance as emerging neo-aesthetics components of appeal. This study contributes to the literature on personal visual communication with insights on how Egyptian young adults perform their self-concept via the semiotic practice of selfie-shooting-sharing.
The conflict over the sovereignty of the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the East China Sea has become intense since the Japanese government announced its purchase of the islands from a private owner in ...2012. Since then, hostile attitudes have been seen in the press between the Chinese and Japanese governments regarding these islands. In order to understand how newspapers present international readers with opinions on the conflict, this article examines visual and written evaluations of the conflict in online English-medium newspaper editorials in China and Japan. To do this, a corpus of editorials published from 1 January 2012 to 31 December 2016 from Chinese newspapers and a Japanese newspaper was compiled. The analysis draws on an appraisal analysis to examine the visual and written evaluations of the texts. The study reveals that the Chinese and Japanese editorials' visual images represent the conflict in their own respective favours by focusing on different entities, and using visual resources such as colour. The visual-written interaction analysis illustrates how different domains of evaluative meanings appear in the visual and written texts in the two sets of editorials.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
This paper applies visual grammar theory to make a multimodal discourse analysis of book covers of the different Chinese versions of
It illustrates the relationship between the social environment and ...social changes in Chinese society and culture in relation to an increasing social acceptance of the novel in China. This research not only validates the applicability and practicability of visual grammar in analyzing book covers, but also helps to show an ideological change in Chinese readers and publishers over time from the 1930s to the 21st century. Indeed, the connotations of book covers of the different Chinese versions of
seem to be closely related to different historical and social contexts. They document and bear witness to, in their particular way, the tremendous changes in Chinese society from early last century on. They also show that Jane, the heroine of the novel, seemed to be re-discovered over and over again in China, depending on the main social features of different periods. She seems to have been portrayed as the gray presence, the feminist, the lover and protagonist, and finally the icon.
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