Literacy as semiotic and discursive learning: Textual productions of students in a Chilean public school

Abstract

Literacy is directly related to meaning making and classroom activities allow students to learn how to use linguistic and semiotic resources to mean in a non-intuitive way. This research seeks to characterize from a semiotic and discursive view a sample of school textual productions, based on the theoretical frameworks of Social Semiotics and Systemic Functional Linguistics. The case study corresponds to a public school in 5th Region (Chile) and analyses an audiovisual corpus of curricular units of Natural Sciences and Social Sciences of a 3rd and 6th grade of Elementary School and a 1st grade of Secondary School. Through a Multimodal Discourse Analysis and genre analysis, the study reveals multimodal ways to define and explain in social and natural sciences as opportunities to expand the vernacular views of understanding the world, though in this case study they rely mostly on transcriptions from model texts.Keywords: Multimodal literacy, genres, semiosis.