The Emergence of Syntagmatic Units in the Composing Processes of Young Students in a Literacy Classroom Context

• In Event: Roundtable Session 125
  In Roundtable Session: Multimodal Composing Processes Across Contexts

Abstract

In this presentation, I explore examples from a case study of the multimodal composing processes of young students (age 5) in a literacy classroom context. Drawing upon a social semiotic perspective, I identified the following types of syntagmatic units and related phenomena as emerging at particular junctures in the students’ composing processes: semiotic linkages, syntagmatic junctures, semiotic configurations, arrangements, and the micro-semiotic resource set. In this article, I define these concepts and describe their role in the students’ multimodal composing processes. These findings offer conceptual development that can be used heuristically to contribute to the broader goal of understanding the social semiotic character of multimodal composing processes of students in classroom contexts.

Author

• Jason Paul Ranker, Portland State University