Semiotic Modes in the Pedagogic Discourse of History: a Semiotic Potential for Mediation in Classroom

Abstract

Learning history involves learning to look to the past in a particular way. In classroom discourse, teachers interact with students bringing them into thinking, representing and communicating social world from three dimensions: time-space, causality and evidentiality (Oteíza, 2009). The multimodal perspective on communication considers the semiotic potential of the various resources that are intertwined in discourse to create meaning in context. This research (Fondecyt 1130684) is carried out from the multimodal approach, systemic functional linguistics and appraisal theory, to explore the semiotic options of three case studies: three teachers of history in the 1st year of Secondary School. The corpus consists of the audiovisual record of three introductory lessons within the same curriculum unit: World War ii. After a multimodal discourse analysis, findings indicate that each teacher chose different combinations of semiotic media and modes to teach the same content. Concerning disciplinary knowledge, the deployment of maps, lists and timelines on the board in interaction with spoken language contribute to the construction of temporal and spatial dimensions, while visual resources, such as photographs and video, contribute to provide evidentiality. On the other hand, oral language learning builds causality in history, promoting student involvement to the proposed interpretation of historical processes. At the same time, the language resource is the support by which the teacher represents himself in the pedagogic discourse as a narrator with varying degrees of subjectivity.

Keywords

• discourse analysis
• pedagogic discourse of history
• multimodality
• semiotic potential
• genre