The construction of meaning in the Second Language Classroom. A Multimodal discourse analysis

Abstract

As technology increasingly shapes the world we live in, communication is affected by these changes. We can no longer talk about one mode for transmitting a message, since multimodality is common, and interaction between several channels to make communication effective is constant. The work presented here analyses from a multimodal point of view the creation of meaning by means of the interaction between images and texts in English as a foreign language by University students. The analysis uses the Descriptive framework of multimodality to study the role of images in the creation of meaning. Then, it analyses how students intermingle texts and images to communicate. The results show that different strategies are used for the communication of unlike types of concepts, and a greater relying on images as concepts increase in abstraction.