3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Intertextual webs: a multimodal, inter-genre approach to English literature in high schools(2020) De Jager, NicholasThis thesis investigates South African high school learners’ remaking of prescribed novels, poems and plays into songs, storyboards and videogame ‘screenshots’ respectively. As a social semiotic study situated in the multimodal paradigm, it unpacks the contextual, thematic and modal features of each redesign and determines how these are representative of the literary elements (and meanings) of the original texts. Three schools − all within the Johannesburg South district − serve as research sites, with eleven FET Phase learners selecting a canonical narrative and using the researcher’s genre frames to draw, colour, write, cut, paste and even sing their way to artefacts that concisely and agentively communicate prescribed themes, characterisations, settings, symbols and moods. Conducted over three months as an extramural, multimodal enrichment programme dubbed the inter-genre approach, the researcher analyses this data with the aid of his label method and five C’s of intertextual linkage; two forms of transmodal captioning which can be applied as both a learning and dataanalytical tool. Three simple but effective research questions not only enable the identification of such ‘links’ between original and remade works, but also the complex embodied process involved in redesign and − perhaps most importantly − the future implications of these for English HL pedagogy and language classrooms in general. The findings emerging from the study are diverse, and many. With regards to the product of participants’ redesigns, it is found that signs are not self-contained entities, but reliant upon a multiplicity of signifiers, modes and materialities to communicate their meanings. As for the process behind this, the author locates drawing, in particular, as an agentive mind-to-hand-to-paper process informed by mental image, transduced meaning and past experience. The final multimodal artefact is thus presented and analysed as a series of mental images, newly embodied. Findings that impact most upon the pedagogic dimension of the study (that is, its future in-class applications) include the possibility of modal affordances being limited only by the sign-maker’s interests or capabilities, and the school-based semiotic chain being permeable to many more out-of-school texts and experiences as previously thought. Another conclusion is that an interconnectedness exists between multiple modes, texts and genres, provided that these are thematically congruent or connected in some way. Thus, school set works are seen not as existing in a vacuum, but relatable to a plethora of out-of-school artforms and activities − particularly digital ones. Eagleton’s seminal concept of webs of signifiers and signifieds (1983) is also expanded to the researcher’s own intertextual webs; a hybrid of the semiotic chain which seeks to track participants’ use of scaffolds and other, primarily screen-based substrates to arrive at the final artefacts. These trackings in turn demonstrate the multimodal revivability (De Jager, 2017) of formally prescribed texts − their ability to be seen again and regain prominence in the discourses of literature, art and entertainment − as a direct result of the proposed approach.Item Lord of the Flies as graphic novel: multimodal pedagogies for prescribed literature in high schools(2017) De Jager, NicholasIn this study, the affordances of a multimodal pedagogy for teaching the prescribed novel, Lord of the Flies, are investigated. The research site is a Grade 10 Visual Art classroom, with six learners serving as the core group. It involves a five-week teaching intervention, whereby participants are required to re-design or re-semiotise a particular scene from the novel into a comic book, or any multimodal narrative that includes both written and visual textual features. Participants’ works are analysed in terms of their modal features − size, shape, colour, contour, texture, written text and overall design − and their semiotic relationship to the original, print-based novel. Finally, the researcher determines which textrelated meanings or interpretations are gained, lost or transformed during this process of resemiotisation, and discusses the possible implications of these for classroom practice. This research may be described as classroom ethnography (Bloome, 2012) within the qualitative paradigm, offering an account of participants’ actions in a real-life, everyday context. Data is collected through ethnographic techniques such as field notes, diary entries, artefact collection and, most crucially, interviews which are conducted before and after the re-semiotisation process. To analyse this data, the researcher draws extensively from literature in the fields of multimodality and social semiotics, particularly the seminal works of Kress (1993; 2000; 2005), Newfield (2009; 2014) and The New London Group (1996). Emphasis is placed on how participants use semiotic resources − in this case, materials acquired in the classroom, from the internet or other domains − to re-shape written texts so that they become more meaningful and accessible for learning. Finally, the findings chapter presents the multimodal pedagogy as a useful outlet for learners’ “own desires, fantasies and interests in the semiotic chain” (Stein, 2003, p. 115). Since participants are positioned centrally within the semiotic space, they can become selfregulated and active agents of meaning making − discovering a canonical text’s themes, symbols, character relations or other sub-textual nuances in and through the visual mode. In the interests of continued research and application in the classroom, a label method is suggested to both track participants’ gains and losses in meaning − upon completion of the entire process − and to determine their level of engagement with the novel’s content. This involves presenting each learner’s artefacts visually, with several labels pointing to the features that speak back most clearly to the source text. Keywords: ● multimodal pedagogy ● social semiotics ● re-semiotisation ● chain of semiosis / meaning-making ● visual and written modes ● literature teaching and learning