Social Semiotics, Teacher Education, and Student Learning in Hard Times: A Critical Literature Review

• In Event: Academic Literacies for K–12 Multilingual Learners: Critical Perspectives in Teacher Education and Professional Learning

Abstract

This literature review analyzes how U.S. teacher educators have attempted to implement a social semiotic conceptualization of language, literacy, learning, and social change over the last two decades to support K-12 multilinguals in developing disciplinary ways of knowing, being, and doing. We analyze this take-up of social semiotics in the context of institutional discourses shaping teachers’ work and students’ learning in U.S. public schools (e.g., the standardization and accountability movement, English only mandates, neoliberalism, nationalism).

Grounded in the collective work of Fairclough, Freire, Halliday, Hasan, Kress, Martin, and Vygotsky, a social semiotic perspective of curriculum design maintains that marginalized multilinguals attending public schools require situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and the transformation of practice if they are to be apprenticed to using disciplinary making-meaning systems to construct disciplinary knowledge in a rapidly changing and increasingly multilingual world (e.g., use of oral and written disciplinary language resources, as well as images, graphs, and equations; New London Group, 1996, p. 65).

We begin by describing how this perspective, which is heavily informed by the social semiotic theory of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and associated pedagogies originally developed in Sydney’s disadvantaged schools, has more recently been recontextualized in U.S. teacher education programs for both English as a second language teachers and teachers of multilingual learners in so-called “mainstream” contexts (e.g., Author, 2019). Next, we outline our systematic review methodology (Cooper, 2015), which resulted in approximately 115 publications from the fields of multilingualism, literacy research, teacher education, and applied linguistics. Third, we present findings from this extensive review. These findings indicate that SFL-based teacher education interventions tended to positively influence teachers’ level of semiotic awareness and ability to design more focused disciplinary literacy instruction. In addition, teachers’ use of SFL pedagogical tools tended to support their students’ level of semiotic awareness and the simultaneous development of disciplinary knowledge and literacy practices. Moreover, sustained investments in teachers’ professional development tended to lead to greater gains in teacher and student learning as well as a critical awareness of the relationship between literacy practices and ideologies at work in schools. However, all SFL interventions placed substantial demands on the knowledge base of U.S. teachers and teacher educators and had the potential to reproduce dominant ideologies regarding language, literacy, and learning within multilingual contexts. Based on these findings, we discuss the intersection of SFL, critical pedagogy, and ideologies regarding race, class, and language circulating in U.S. public schools and teacher education programs (e.g., Rosa, 2019).

Authors

• Kathryn Accurso, The University of British Columbia

• Meg Gebhard, University of Massachusetts - Amherst