Annotation in School English: A Social Semiotic Historical Account

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.)