Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis: Exploring Civic Identities of Multilingual Youth

• In Event: New Pathways in Multimodal and Multilingual Learning: Moving Beyond Normative Practices

Abstract

Purposes
In our civic engagement afterschool program in the southeast of the United States, our youth and adult participants use a range of modalities including mapping, rapping, drawing, and performance to convey their unique visions of school and community spaces. The purpose of this methodological paper is to explore systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF MDA) as a potential resource to gauge the effectiveness of humanizing and multimodal spaces in positioning youth as civic leaders in our programs (Paris & Alim, 2017).

Theoretical Framework
Halliday’s (1978) social semiotic perspective provides a framework for exploring how meaning is constructed differently depending on the communicative context and purpose (e.g., mapping the layout of a village compared with writing a report about the village). When using an SF MDA approach, a metafunctional analysis involved exploring how meaning (experiential, interpersonal, and textual) is enacted within and across each meaning making system (e.g., language, gestures, embodied use of artifacts, body posture); and how identification processes emerge through the meaning making (Veum, et al, 2020).

Methods
Our socio-semiotic ethnographic approach to data collection included primary focus on participants’ use of modes, modalities, material resources, and movement. In conducting the SF-MDA analysis, we adopted semiotic units as the unit of analysis, wherein at least one participant conveyed a minimal but coherent segment of meaning. Video was central to capture the affordances of the modes, including the content of the multilingual learners’ speech as well as the detailed movement of their gestures and other semiotic resources. Based on Bezemer (2014), we designed transcripts by determining the beginning and end of each semiotic unit within the larger activity event. We then identified key semiotic resources that the focal participants used within and across the semiotic units to communicate with the larger group.

Results
The SF-MDA analysis helped us identify how focal participants harnessed configurations of modes to enact the three meaning systems (ideational, interpersonal, and textual). It also supported us in seeing how multilingual youth used multimodal assemblages to convey innovative insights about community and position themselves as agentive civic leaders.

Scholarly Significance
The analysis shows that SF-MDA framework supported teacher educators in seeing some of the subtle and agentive ways that youth members orchestrated their multimodal meaning making and their civic leadership. We contribute to discussion of SF-MDA’s educational value by highlighting how it can be used to call attention to the semiotic repertoires of youth immersed in civic engagement work in and outside school contexts.

Authors

• Ruth Harman, University of Georgia
  Presenting Author

• Khanh Bui, University of Georgia
  Presenting Author

• Lourdes Cardozo-Gaibisso, Mississippi State University
  Presenting Author

• Max Vazquez Dominguez, University of North Georgia
  Presenting Author

• Cory A. Buxton, Oregon State University
  Presenting Author

• Shuang Fu, New York University
  Presenting Author