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The aim of this paper is to critically review how social semiotics has contributed to the study of reading and to develop an agenda for further research. We consider the theoretical and methodological resources that social semiotics has developed to account for multimodal text in the contemporary semiotic landscape, and explore how they can be used to teach critical reading skills to young people to support their participation in different social domains. We reflect on the possibilities and limitations of different analytical frameworks, highlighting barriers and possibilities for advancing social semiotic scholarship on reading and beyond. We end with a sketch of a new research agenda for social semiotics, in the light of technological change and its implications for reading.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including scholar Gunther Kress's influence on semiotics, multimodality, and educational theory, celebrating his transformative contributions to meaning-making.

This paper presents a conceptual analysis and critical review of the notion of 'affordance' and its uptake, transformation and application in the work of Gunther Kress. It traces its origins and explores how Kress, co-founder of social semiotics, (re)conceptualised affordance and incorporated it in his social semiotic theory of sign making, defining affordance in terms of the "potentials and limitations of specific modes". The paper discusses how his take on the term was received, and develops a radical critique questioning the analytical merits of affordance. It concludes with a call for a return to Kress's original question of exactly what it is about a form (signifier) that makes it suitable, in the eyes of the sign maker, for what they want to express (signified), and to consider materiality and social convention alongside the sign maker's lifeworld, audience, situation, and conditions of sign making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parent and therapist engagement and partnership are critical in early intervention physiotherapy and occupational therapy for infants with cerebral palsy to improve outcomes. The main aim of this study was to understand how parents perceive their engagement experience in early intervention over time. Grounded theory methodology was used. Twenty parents of diverse backgrounds participated in 22 interviews (including some repeated longitudinally) to reflect on their engagement experience within the context of early intervention community services provided in the UK NHS. The findings highlight how parents' perspectives of their engagement in EI change according to critical circumstances, including their preceding neonatal trauma, the at-risk CP label, firmer diagnosis of CP and their child's response to intervention. We theorise that this disrupted transition experience to parenthood becomes part of parental framing (or sense-making) of their engagement in EI. Overlapping frames of uncertainty, pursuit and transformation capture and explain nuances in parents' engagement patterns within EI over time. This theorising has implications for early intervention therapists in how they engage in the lives of families and partner with parents to support healthier parental transition, wellbeing and subsequent improved infant outcomes. New insights are provided into how recent advances to prognostic practices for infants with cerebral palsy affect parental perspectives and their engagement experience in early intervention The paper's organising concepts support a clearer understanding for early intervention practitioners of this complex parent experience Early intervention practitioners are encouraged to reflect upon their practice as they engage in families' lives and partner with parents during this challenging period to optimise outcomes [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) are multimodal communicators. However, in classroom interactions involving children and staff, achieving mutual understanding and accomplishing task-oriented goals by attending to the child's unaided AAC can be challenging. This study draws on excerpts of video recordings of interactions in a classroom for 6–9-year-old children who used AAC to explore how three child participants used the range of multimodal resources available to them – vocal, movement-based, and gestural, technological, temporal – to shape (and to some degree, co-control) classroom interactions. Our research was concerned with examining achievements and problems in establishing a sense of common ground and the realization of child agency. Through detailed multimodal analysis, this paper renders visible different types of practices rejecting a request for clarification, drawing new parties into a conversation, disrupting whole-class teacher talk-through which the children in the study voiced themselves in persuasive ways. It concludes by suggesting that multimodal accounts paint a more nuanced picture of children's resourcefulness and conversational asymmetry that highlights children's agency amidst material, semiotic, and institutional constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review is on Lilian Pozzer and Wolff-Michael Roth's "A cultural-historical perspective on the multimodal development of concepts in science lectures." We offer some brief observations from within the paradigm of social semiotics, more specifically from our own attempts to produce multimodal accounts of learning in and beyond the classroom. We propose to treat meaning as the outcome of social action and interaction: clearly, environments and practices of learning and teaching come within that frame. We comment on the categories and implicit distinctions of "verbal vs nonverbal," and the relative visibility and invisibility of meaning makers (teacher and learner) and their use of semiotic resources in accounts of learning. We highlight the agency of learners and propose a transformation of the role of "teacher" into that of "designer (of learning environments)". We conclude by briefly speculating on the possibility of bringing the two distinct paradigms into dialogue and conjunction. [This review is on Lilian Pozzer and Wolff-Michael Roth's "A Cultural-Historical Perspective on the Multimodal Development of Concepts in Science Lectures" (EJ1248286).]

This paper offers a historically comparative picture of the latest waves of policy and technological changes that have occurred between 2000-2006 and discusses their impact on the practices of secondary school English in the UK. It draws on data from two previous research projects to explore significant moments of micro-interaction in a classroom that can be framed and integrated in the broader macro social and policy contexts of the production of school English. Specifically the paper offers a comparison of two distinct "moments"--2000, when the first data set was collected, and 2006 with a focus on the impact of technological and policy change for English. (Contains 1 table and 2 footnotes.)

What exactly has changed in the production of secondary school English over the last decade? To provide one part of an answer to that question, this paper takes the practice of annotation--a defining activity of the subject English in the UK seldom researched--and uses it as a device for uncovering aspects of changes in the subject. The theoretical approach is that of multimodal social semiotics with an historical perspective. A multimodal approach looks beyond language to all forms of communication. The approach used in this paper allows investigation of the interactions among changes in the social environment, policy, curriculum, technology, and student resources. The authors draw on illustrative examples from three research projects around subject English. Their analysis shows that by 2009, the policy, technological, and communicational landscape of school English had changed dramatically. Now the majority of English lessons are taught on an Internet-enabled interactive whiteboard (IWB) supported by scanners, visualizers, and wireless peripherals such as slates. (Contains 3 figures.)

Frequently writing is now no longer the central mode of representation in learning materials--textbooks, Web-based resources, teacher-produced materials. Still (as well as moving) images are increasingly prominent as carriers of meaning. Uses and forms of writing have undergone profound changes over the last decades, which calls for a social, pedagogical, and semiotic explanation. Two trends mark that history. The digital media, rather than the (text) book, are more and more the site of appearance and distribution of learning resources, and writing is being displaced by image as the central mode for representation. This poses sharp questions about present and future roles and forms of writing. For text, "design" and "principles of composition" move into the foreground. Here we sketch a social semiotic account that aims to elucidate such principles and permits consideration of their epistemological as well as social/pedagogic significance. Linking representation with social factors, we put forward terms to explore two issues: the principles underlying the design of multimodal ensembles and the potential epistemological and pedagogic effects of multimodal designs. Our investigation is set within a research project with a corpus of learning resources for secondary school in Science, Mathematics, and English from the 1930s, the 1980s, and from the first decade of the 21st century, as well as digitally represented and online learning resources from the year 2000 onward. (Contains 9 figures.)

This paper is about the displays of orientation that students use to participate in the classroom. It is argued that students use their direction of gaze, body posture, gesture and other modes of communication to realize such displays and respond to what goes on when they are not nominated speakers. The focus of the paper is on the silent but active participation of a recently immigrated student in a secondary classroom in England. Fine grained analysis of the preparatory stages of a lesson on Romeo and Juliet shows that she demonstrates understanding of the changing contextual grounds for meaning making in the classroom through careful alignment of her displays of orientation with the subsequent stages in the whole-class activity. It is suggested that this interactional fluency will have a significant impact on her educational career. (Contains 3 figures.)

This article reports the findings of a qualitative investigation into the e-learning experiences of educational practitioners in England studying for accredited Continuing Professional Development. The research was conducted with a cohort of participants studying on a mixed-mode professional learning masters programme for teachers. It focused on the subjective and perceptual aspects of the e-learners' experiences, and aimed to investigate how they can be gauged as part of an evaluation strategy which is built into course design. An innovative methodology was devised based on the collection of learner narratives which required a continuous process of meta-level engagement with their experiences by the participants. Both novices and experienced e-learners experienced unforeseen challenges in e-learning activities related to professional development. The study identified opportunities for meta-learning as central to the teachers' successful adaptation to collaborative e-learning processes within such programmes. (Contains 3 figures and 1 note.)

This article explores the attribution of linguistic resources to multilingual students in a primary school in the Netherlands. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a regular, multicultural classroom, it describes patterns of attribution emerging from observations of classroom activities and interviews with the teacher. Its focus is on the discrepancies between linguistic resources implied in classroom activities and those attributed to the students in the teacher's retrospective accounts of those activities. It shows how mistakes in the construction of sentences made by individual students are attributed to a lack of a certain "feeling" for word order and overgeneralized to account for all "foreign children". A review of the students' mistakes puts the lack of a feeling for "how we say that in the Netherlands" into perspective. Two questions are addressed in discussing these outcomes. First, what discourses may have informed the observed patterns of attribution? Second, is it feasible or indeed necessary for language teaching in multilingual contexts to make accurate attributions?

In this paper, multicultural primary school classes in Norway and the Netherlands are compared in terms of language teaching and learning. Drawing on observations, interviews, and school and policy documents, four dimensions of comparison are discussed. First, we deal with the different ways in which separate language classes for language minority pupils were organized in the two cases. Secondly, the different ways of teaching and the underlying views on learning language are characterized. Thirdly, we analyse how these ways of teaching affect on language minority pupils. Fourthly, we address the question as to how these approaches relate to the educational policies, traditions and discourses of the respective countries.