A Social Semiotic Awareness Raising Approach: Co-Designing English for Academic Purposes Assessment, Teaching, and Learning Activities During COVID-19

• In Event: Social Semiotics, New Materiality, and Multimodal Composing

Abstract

This paper reconceptualises English for Academic Purposes (EAP) with a social semiotic perspective, heightening both teacher and students’ awareness of the social semiotic processes of multimodal, plurilingual, pluricultural design as they negotiate meanings, values and socio-cultural identities, using multimodal resources to co-design assessment, teaching and learning activities that build on and support one another. An action research approach (Altrichter, Posch, & Somekh, 2007) was used to explore how to raise students’ social semiotic awareness for (i) overcoming the challenges in screen-mode centric meaning making processes; and (ii) reflecting on the communication and emotion consequences of screen-mode teaching/ learning. The research/ pedagogical intervention invited 90 design students in a community college in Hong Kong to co-design a multimodal product in groups.

Author

• Phoebe SIU, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University