Gunther Kress's research while affiliated with UCL Eastman Dental Institute and other places
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Publications (100)
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...
Our aim is to describe what we regard as nothing less than a paradigm shift – in societies where this change is taking place. It is a move from a paradigm in which the mode of writing (‘language’, in traditional parlance) was assumed to provide the ontological and epistemological basis for describing, understanding, and accounting for ‘the world’,...
This entry provides a brief overview of social semiotics. It begins with a brief historical account, presents some major texts, and mentions research that has contributed to the development of the theory. Key concepts are introduced—such as mode, interest, sign, design, semiotic work, text, and meaning‐making. The issues of literacy and education a...
This chapter argues that the aesthetic is inseparable from the semiotic, and that the question of aesthetics needs to be explored from certain principles of Social Semiotics, including in its relation to the domain of multimodality. Social Semiotics, with its resources of multimodality, offers a way to read across these phenomena of contemporary co...
This entry provides a brief overview of social semiotics. It begins with a brief historical account, presents some major texts and mentions some research which has contributed to the development of the theory. Key concepts are introduced, such as mode, interest, sign, design, semiotic work, text and meaning making. The issues of literacy and educat...
В сборнике рассматриваются способы изучения возникающих и развивающихся явлений. Первостепенное внимание уделяется использованию морфологических и семиотических методов. Обсуждаются проблемы формирования Вселенной и биосферы, человечества, когнитивных и научно-исследовательских способностей людей, а также создания новых методов и методик научных ис...
Der er mange forhold der trænger sig på i den aktuelle sproglærings- og undervisningsverden i Europa. De falder i to kategorier: sociale og kulturelle problemstillinger, og teknologiske problemstillinger. (...)
In this paper we develop a social semiotic account of continuity and change across texts. Our aims are to make a theoretical contribution to scholarly work on inter-textual relations by adopting a multimodal perspective; and to develop a framework for understanding how texts mediate knowing, learning and agency in education and beyond. We achieve t...
В сборнике рассматривается мировой и отечественный опыт исследований в области методологической трансдисциплинарности. Обсуждаются и анализируются проблемы «когнитивных оснований» трансдисциплинарных методов в науке как они представлены в современной когнитивистике, философии и методологии науки. В качестве наиболее перспективных трансдисциплинарны...
Video recording technologies offer a powerful way to document what happens in clinical areas.1 Cameras, and to a lesser extent, microphones, can be found in a growing number of modern operating rooms in the USA, UK and other parts of the world. While they could be used to create a detailed record of what happens in and around the operating table, t...
In this chapter we explore communication and learning in the contemporary social world. Taking the textbook as a 'case study' we identify changes in multimodal text making – in the use of writing, image, layout and typography – and highlight their social pedagogic significance. The theoretical frame of our account is social semiotics. Drawing on a...
This state-of-the-art account of research and theorizing brings together multimodality, learning and communication through detailed analyses of signmakers and their meaning-making in museums, hospitals, schools and the home environment. By analyzing video recordings, photographs, screenshots and print materials, Jeff Bezemer and Gunther Kress go we...
Aim:
To explore the unsettling effects of increased mobility of nurses, surgeons and other healthcare professionals on communication and learning in the operating theatre.
Background:
Increasingly, healthcare professionals step in and out of newly formed transient teams and work with colleagues they have not met before, unsettling previously rel...
This article imagines a tussle between Multimodality, focused on ‘modes’, and Applied Linguistics (AL), based on ‘language’. A Social Semiotic approach to MM treats speech and writing as modes with distinct affordances, and, as all modes, treats them as ‘partial’ means of communication. The implications of partiality confound long-held assumptions...
In this article we attempt to provide some ways of thinking about touch. Our aim is to develop new insights into 'touch', as well as in meaning making and communication more generally, by bringing into 'explicitness' meanings which, at present, are referred to by labels such as 'implicit', 'tacit' or 'embodied'. We wish to show that this discussion...
Recently a group of scholars from Sweden and (a smaller group) from the UK, came together and worked on a project “‘The Museum, the Exhibition and the Visitors: Meaning making in a new arena for learning and communication’ (funded by the Swedish Research Council - Vetenskapsrådet). As the title indicates, the frame set for the project was large and...
Research methodology using visual narrative techniques opens up conceptual views for interpreting a wide range of visuals. In this article, the authors analyse tattoos on a subject's body and approach the task from what they term three 'optics': social semiotics; sedimented identity in texts; and New Literacy Studies in relation to multimodality, d...
In this article, we show what surgical training looks like in situ. Drawing on fieldwork in a London hospital, we explore how a trainer and trainee jointly achieve surgical care when the trainee holds the scalpel. We make this common pedagogic arrangement visible through transcription and analysis of audio- and video-recorded interaction in the ope...
Imagine three pictures of ‘classrooms’ in (European) schools, spanning a period of some 700 years.1 In the first, we see a medieval lecture ‘theatre’: the teacher sits on the raised cathedra, an audience of adult students, in clerical robes, are seated in rows before him. A second picture shows an English ‘monitorial school’: a vast hall, in shape,...
In this article the main question is: what might Social Semiotics offer to studies of the ‘cross-cultural’? Social Semiotics distinguishes between ‘society’ and ‘culture’. ‘The social’ is the domain of interaction seen as semiotic work, organized in fields of power. ‘Culture’ is the repository of semiotic resources, of material and non-material kin...
In this article, a design-oriented, multimodal understanding of learning will be outlined. There seems to be a need for a new conceptualisation of learning in an era characterised by an increasing virtual space, blended media and new communicative patterns. This means a broader understanding of learning, and a theoretical understanding of transform...
In this paper we exemplify how a social semiotic approach to pupils’ multimodal texts (texts which draw on and make available to the senses a range of resources, including the visual, material, and actional) can provide a way into understanding learning. We suggest that learning can be seen as a transformative process of sign making. Specifically,...
The construction of entities (such as cells) is a gradual process, not the result of direct and immediate reading of the ‘facts.’
This paper argues that this is the case for both scientists and pupils in science education. The paper is based on an analysis
of the historical formation of the notion of cells by scientists, and our analysis of a lesso...
The aim of this paper is to show how a substantive area of social research –learning– can be investigated using a multimodal social semiotic approach. We apply the approach to three different institutions – a school, a museum and a hospital, illustrating key concepts and addressing issues around pedagogy and technology in contemporary society. A mu...
The focus of this article is on professional activity in the operating theater. We explore how surgeons and nurses organize their activities, how social interaction is used to help structure and define situations, and how differentials in knowledge are constructed and oriented to. We utilize some ideas and concepts from symbolic interactionism, eth...
The chapter provides a view on surgical education from the perspective of an outsider with an interest in meaning and learning. It asks questions such as ‘How might learning in surgical education differ from learning in other areas?’ ‘What is the knowledge
of surgery and how can it be represented as a curriculum in order to appear usefully in envir...
Argued from the perspective of a Social Semiotic Multimodal theory the article asks whether and in what ways ‘Ethnography’ and ‘Social Semiotics’ can or should be brought together to mutual advantage. It suggests that such an enterprise is ‘of its time’: the world as mirrored in existing disciplines has changed and the disciplines that co-constitut...
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
The article discusses "the content and shape" of the resources for making meaning and the shape of the social environment in which – differently in different places and yet similar in essential respects –the English and literacy classroom is located. At any one time, any aspect of the complex dynamic communicational ensemble might be significant fo...
In this paper we provide a multimodal account of historical changes in secondary school textbooks in England and their social significance. Adopting a social semiotic approach to text and text making we review learning resources across core subjects of the English national curriculum, English, Science and Mathematics. Comparing textbooks from the 1...
Contemporary social conditions in Anglophone and Western European societies are markedly different to those of some four decades
ago. Stability – even though that had only ever been relative – has given way to instability; homogeneity has given way to
often radical diversity; permanence has given way to provisionality, a condition in which crucial...
As with television and computers before it, today's mobile technology challenges educators to respond and ensure their work is relevant to students. What's changed is that this portable, cross-contextual way of engaging with the world is driving a more proactive approach to learning on the part of young people. The first full-length authored treatm...
The 21st century is awash with ever more mixed and remixed images, writing, layout, sound, gesture, speech, and 3D objects. Multimodality looks beyond language and examines these multiple modes of communication and meaning making. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication represents a long-awaited and much anticipated...
In this article, the authors provide an empirically based, social semiotic account of changes in textbook design between 1930 and the present day. They look at the multimodal design of textbooks rather than at image or any other mode in isolation. Their review of 23 textbooks for secondary education in English shows that profound changes have taken...
Some 15 years ago, the 10 people who had been brought together—assembled as much for their distinctly different views as for their broadly shared pedagogical and political outlook—set to discussing at least two distinct concerns embedded in the project and in the term multiliteracies. One such concern focused on theoretical frames and the other foc...
This thesis investigates the interaction by means of videos on YouTube.Video-interaction is a new form of communication which has been taking place on YouTube since May 2006 thanks to the introduction of the ‘video response’ option. The functionality enables (You)Tubers to reply to any given video by means of another video; hence whole communicatio...
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 t...
The world of meaning is multimodal. It always has been and now, for a variety of reasons, that awareness is once again moving
onto centre stage. In education, a range of questions arises from this recent recognition. Among these, the two linked questions
are becoming insistently urgent: ‘How do we assess learning expressed in multimodal texts, obje...
Globalization impacts on education everywhere; it is impossible to consider issues of curriculum or pedagogy without bearing
in mind the effects of globalization. Here I consider to what extent it is possible to imagine curricula and pedagogies which
could function at a global level? I do so from an anglo-phone perspective, from within the UK (and...
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, pedago...
This article sketches the contemporary environments of education in “developed societies” where many of the metaphors and myths still governing educational thinking and policy derive from a past that is socially and economically organised differently. It mentions the specific issue of educating the “transitional generation”; straddling shifts in po...
This chapter explores the implications of contemporary environments and the affordances of mobile technologies for learning with particular reference to text-making and implications for schools. And, it discusses the emergence of a 'new habitus of learning'
In this paper, I look at what might be gained and what might be lost as we move from representation primarily through writing to representation primarily though image. In so doing, I also consider issues related to learning, knowledge, and human agency.
In this interview, Gunther Kress proposes how English needs to expand beyond its traditional linguistic frame into a semiotic frame which recognizes not only the visual but other modes. He argues also for a shift to forms of production in which the acts of reflection and meaning-making are fused, rather than separating the production of new meaning...
This book is forms the final report of an ESRC funded project 'The Production of School English', a collaborative project between the University of London Institute of Education, Keele University and the University of Southampton. It spans a range of issues central to contemporary school English, attending not only to the spoken and written languag...
English in Urban Classrooms is a ground-breaking text that spans a range of issues central to school English today. It extends not only to the spoken and written language of classrooms, but also to other modes of representation and communication that are important in English teaching. This includes image, gesture, gaze, movement and spatial organis...
In this paper I wish to point to what I see as the central issues in the linked shifts in representation and dissemination: that is, from the constellation of mode of writing and medium of book/page, to the constellation of mode of image and medium of screen. In particular I will draw attention to consequent shifts in authority, in changes in forms...
This paper discusses ways in which young bilingual children understand the principles underlying different writing systems. Six case studies were conducted, involving six-year-olds growing up in London who were learning to write in Chinese, Arabic or Spanish at the same time as English. The children's formal and informal literacy interactions were...
This article argues that children gain access to an enhanced range of communicative resources through familiarity with more than one writing system. Different scripts can be seen as different modes, giving rise to a variety of potentials for meaning-making. In case-studies of children’s responses to learning Chinese, Arabic or Spanish as well as En...
This paper draws together various strands of argument in the emerging field of 'New Literacy Studies' to put forward the view that we need to re-evaluate how literacy is conceptualised, taught and assessed. Three central themes form the basis of the argument. First, the paper points to the emergence of the so-called new economy and globalisation, a...
This article presents a brief review of several approaches of 'grammar', as the basis for a discussion of culturally produced regularities in the uses of colour; that is, the possibility of extending the use of 'grammar' to colour as a communicational resource. Colour is discussed as a semiotic resource - a mode, which, like other modes, is multifu...
This paper draws on ideas and data from the ESRC funded research 'Rhetorics of the science classroom: a multimodal approach'. It suggests that learning is realised through the interaction between visual, actional and linguistic communication (i.e. learning is multimodal) and involves the transformation of information across different communicative...
In this article, the author begins by addressing questions surrounding the issue of “literacy” and reflects on some aims of literacy curricula in culturally plural postindustrial societies. He then adopts a social semiotic multimodal approach to data analysis in which there is a sharp focus on the semiotic modes that are in play and on the forms of...
As conceptions of communication shift from a single focus on language to the full repertoire of communicational resources (e.g. image, action, sound), this paper challenges the assumption that learning and teaching are primarily linguistic accomplishments. Through an example of school-based teaching, we show that classroom texts are realised throug...
Gunther Kress is professor of education/English in the Institute of Education at University of London. His interests focus on the (English) curriculum, multiliteracies, and multimodality, that is, the developing forms of representation and their implications for the futures of education in school and out of school. His forthcoming publications incl...
This article examines changes in the representational communicational landscapes of the contemporary world and their profound effects on education in its institutional form. In particular the changes have effects in four areas: (1) in the agendas of public education; (2) in the shifting relations of the lifewords of child, school, and forms of the...
Resumo Este artigo apresenta e discute um referencial para análise de episódios explicativos na sala de aula de ciências desenvolvido a partir de análises de contribuições teóricas nas áreas de Educação em Ciências, Linguística, Ciência Cognitiva, e de investigações empíricas envolvendo observação de aulas de ciências em escolas secundárias da regi...
The paper proposes that Language Awareness cannot be fully developed if it rests on a view of language from within. The proposal made here is that language is always one of a number of semiotic (communication/representational) modes in use in any act of communication, and that language may not be the central mode. The relations which language contr...
In this paper I would like to challenge radically the implicit equation of language and cognition which I believe underlies and underpins much educational thinking. Specifically I wish to suggest that this equation underpins much of the present educational thinking and practice in relation to multicultural/pluricultural societies. On the one hand I...
Massenkommunikation mit ihrer Gier nach Veränderung produziert ständig neue Sendungen, Serien oder Ereignisse, die sich nicht mehr zureichend mit dem uns vertrauten Ordnungsschema der Genres zusammenfassen oder abgrenzen lassen. In den achtziger Jahren gab es in der Linguistik ein starkes Interesse, sich mit Phänomen und Theorie des Genres auseinan...
Ein Proteststurm fegte Wrestling vom neuen Sendeplatz am Sonntag nachmittag bei RTL2. RTL2, ein Sender mit Vollprogramm, hatte WWF-Wrestling seit etwa zwei Jahren zwei mal wöchentlich nach 21 Uhr gesendet. Im August 1995 wurde WWF-Wrestling auf Sonntag nachmittag von 16 bis 18 Uhr und damit auf eine von Kindern favorisierte Zeit vorverlegt. Daraufh...
Special issue. Incl. bibl., abstracts.
Citations
... This contribution undertakes a close analysis of print and digital tourism ads as specific case studies (taken from magazines, social media, homepages and display panels at railway stations) to identify how time reference and time deixis are established in destination advertising primarily through image and text design. Methodologically, the study is based on social semiotic multimodal discourse analysis (see Jewitt and Henriksen, 2016;Kress 2010Kress , 2012Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001, 2006[1996). ...
... A key point to draw attention to here is that the concepts outlined in this section can be applied across any kind of representation or interaction -be it a printed or digital text (Jewitt, 2002), a classroom with or without technology (Jewitt et al., 2011) or a complex interaction in a digitally mediated environment such as a surgical operating theatre . Thus, a researcher can employ multimodality to investigate the modal meaning potentials of a resource (e.g. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/476521157664771-1490622905832_Q64/Jeff-Bezemer.jpg)
... ressources résultent d'un même processus cognitif et font partie d'un système intégré unique. À la suite deKress (2019) et de sa sémiotique sociale, nous considérons que c'est de leur combinaison que naît le sens. Les ressources PMG, les gestes en particulier, étant une source d'input supplémentaire favorisant la compréhension et l'apprentissage d'une langue, s'intéresser aux ressources multimodales mobilisées lors d'échanges en L2 reste une voie prometteuse pour la didactique et l'acquisition des L2. erm : indique une hésitation ? ...
... The selected videos have been analyzed using multimodal discourse analysis (Bezemer & Kress, 2017). This approach, rooted in social semiotics, looks at multiple modes of communication (verbal, textual, visual, aural, etc.) focusing not only on how individual modes communicate but how they interact with one another to create semiotic meaning (Adami, 2015). ...
... In the Singapore context, with the integration of multiliteracies in the language classroom, teachers now use a range of multimodal texts as learning resources and are also exploring how to design more opportunities to have students make and represent meaning with a range of semiotic modes. The value of having students create digital multimodal compositions in the English Language classroom has been well-established (e.g., Burn & Kress, 2018;Hafner & Miller, 2019;Mills & Unsworth, 2018;Potter, 2018). It has also been recognised that students who participate in digital multimodal composing practices, such as video production, often demonstrate creativity, critical thinking, and a semiotic awareness, which are evident upon analyses of their artefacts (Knobel, 2017;Towndrow, Nelson & Yusuf, 2013). ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/594649710342144-1518786947702_Q64/Andrew-Burn.jpg)
... Por otro lado, la ubicuidad de las pantallas ha dado paso a nuevas formas de socializar y de mostrarse frente a otros; prácticas instaladas en las vidas de muchos a través de distintas tecnologías (Gualberto & Kress, 2020), debiendo adaptarse a plataformas digitales y a clases virtuales, que incluso trasladaron las desigualdades de la escuela presencial a la escuela virtual (Núñez, 2020). La mirada semiótica y social a las formas de comunicación señala que los soportes para comunicar ofrecen maneras distintas de crear signi#cados, no traducibles entre sí, que dan forma y, a la vez, están in%uenciados por los aspectos sociales, culturales, económicos y políticos (Bezemer & Kress, 2016). ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/642112915795989-1530103057369_Q64/Clarice-Gualberto.jpg)
... As a second triplet, the three notions need to be applied to modes (as technologies for representation), media (as technologies for designing, producing and distributing them) and genres (as entextualisations of social practices/relations). The third triplet concerns the variables that (Adami 2009) and in Gunther's book (Kress 2010), with me reaching the conclusion that videointeraction was paradigmatic of contemporary principles of communication, with successful communication no longer defined by mutual understanding of the interactants' intended meanings, but by individualized participation in chains of semiosis producing compatible effects that fulfilled the interactants' diverse interests. need to be considered at each and all levels, i.e. materiality, socio-cultural availability, and sign-makers' agency. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/277507820539912-1443174428824_Q64/Elisabetta-Adami.jpg)
... By referring to speech and gestures as two modes for making meaning within learning situations (Bezemer and Kress 2020), we propose to explore argumentative practices in the context of science education by considering the semiotic resources that contribute to the understanding of pupils' argumentation at school. We also are looking to identify the multimodal resources that make teachers aware of the children's way of combining different skills. ...
... multimodal texts, Jewitt and Kress 2003;Bateman et al. 2017;Bezemer and Cowan 2021). This multimodal literacy shapes how students learn and use language (Kress 2003;Kress and Rowsell 2018). For example, the traditionally separate genre activities of viewing and producing picture sharing, story narration, and commentary making now often occur in integrated genre activities on social platforms (e.g. ...
... of literary works in the form of short stories and poetry [6], as well as the transformation of old wise advice in their own language carried out by students [7], is literacy in a new meaning, literacy as a social practice [8]- [11] or termed new literacy [12], [13]. Research initiated the study of literacy content in textbooks, including scientific literacy in thematic books [14] and the development of text-rich teaching materials [15] as student literacy readings. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/278840791322625-1443492233191_Q64/Kate-Pahl.jpg)