Books by Maria Grazia Sindoni
CFRIDIL is a comprehensive set of guidelines to systematically describe levels of proficiency for... more CFRIDIL is a comprehensive set of guidelines to systematically describe levels of proficiency for students and European citizens across Europe and other countries.
It describes what a successful digital literate European citizen must be able to do and understand in transnational digital environment.
CFRIDiL is divided into broad level groups, sub-divided into further levels, from breakthrough to proficiency. For each level, it includes descriptors which tells what a learner is supposed to be able to do in receptive and productive skills, in terms of digital literacy in international and intercultural contexts.
These systematic descriptors deal with the comprehension, production, and interpretation of the contemporary digital textuality for international and intercultural communication.
If CEFR descriptors illustrate language skills, and DigComp 2.0 descriptors illustrate digital skills as such, CFRIDiL descriptors focus on skills that include consideration of visual and auditory resources afforded in digital environments in relation to their meaning-making potential in international and intercultural contexts instead, hence including more comprehensive multimodal, sociosemiotic and critical skills that take into consideration the expectations of socioculturally diverse audience and contexts.
CFRIDIL is a comprehensive set of guidelines to systematically describe levels of proficiency for... more CFRIDIL is a comprehensive set of guidelines to systematically describe levels of proficiency for students and European citizens across Europe and other countries.
It describes what a successful digital literate European citizen must be able to do and understand in transnational digital environment.
CFRIDiL is divided into broad level groups, sub-divided into further levels, from breakthrough to proficiency. For each level, it includes descriptors which tells what a learner is supposed to be able to do in receptive and productive skills, in terms of digital literacy in international and intercultural contexts.
These systematic descriptors deal with the comprehension, production, and interpretation of the contemporary digital textuality for international and intercultural communication.
If CEFR descriptors illustrate language skills, and DigComp 2.0 descriptors illustrate digital skills as such, CFRIDiL descriptors focus on skills that include consideration of visual and auditory resources afforded in digital environments in relation to their meaning-making potential in international and intercultural contexts instead, hence including more comprehensive multimodal, sociosemiotic and critical skills that take into consideration the expectations of socioculturally diverse audience and contexts.
This book is a first attempt to map the broad context of performance studies from a multimodal pe... more This book is a first attempt to map the broad context of performance studies from a multimodal perspective. It collects original research on traditional performing arts (theatre, dance, opera), live (durational performance) and mediated/recorded performances (films, television shows), as well as performative discursive practices on social media by adopting several theories and methodologies all dealing with the notion of multimodality. As a mostly dynamic and also interactive environment for various text types and genres, the context of performance studies provides many opportunities to produce meaning verbally and non-verbally. All chapters in this book develop frameworks for the analysis of performance-related events and activities and explore empirical case studies in a range of different ages and cultures. A further focus lies on the communicative strategies deployed by different communities of practice, taking into account processes of production, distribution, and consumption of such texts in diverse spatial and temporal contexts.
Common patterns of interactions are altered in the digital world and new patterns of communicatio... more Common patterns of interactions are altered in the digital world and new patterns of communication have emerged, challenging previous notions of what communication actually is in the contemporary age. Online configurations of interaction, such as video chats, blogging, and social networking practices demand profound rethinking of the categories of linguistic analysis, given the blurring of traditional distinctions between oral and written discourse in digital texts. This volume reconsiders underlying linguistic and semiotic frameworks of analysis of spoken and written discourse in the light of the new paradigms of online communication, in keeping with a multimodal corpus linguistics theoretical framework.
Typical modes of online interaction encompass speech, writing, gesture, movement, gaze, and social distance. This is nothing new, but here Sindoni asserts that all these modes are integrated in unprecedented ways, enacting new interactional patterns and new systems of interpretation among web users. These "non verbal" modes have been sidelined by mainstream linguistics, whereas accounting for the complexity of new genres and making sense of their educational impact is high on this volume’ s agenda. Sindoni analyzes other new phenomena, ranging from the intimate sphere (i.e. video chats, personal blogs or journals on social networking websites) to the public arena (i.e. global-scale transmission of information and knowledge in public blogs or media-sharing communities), shedding light on the rapidly changing global web scenario.
Common patterns of interactions are altered in the digital world and new patterns of communicatio... more Common patterns of interactions are altered in the digital world and new patterns of communication have emerged, challenging previous notions of what communication actually is in the contemporary age. Online configurations of interaction, such as video chats, blogging, and social networking practices demand profound rethinking of the categories of linguistic analysis, given the blurring of traditional distinctions between oral and written discourse in digital texts. This volume reconsiders underlying linguistic and semiotic frameworks of analysis of spoken and written discourse in the light of the new paradigms of online communication, in keeping with a multimodal corpus linguistics theoretical framework.
Typical modes of online interaction encompass speech, writing, gesture, movement, gaze, and social distance. This is nothing new, but here Sindoni asserts that all these modes are integrated in unprecedented ways, enacting new interactional patterns and new systems of interpretation among web users. These "non verbal" modes have been sidelined by mainstream linguistics, whereas accounting for the complexity of new genres and making sense of their educational impact is high on this volume’ s agenda. Sindoni analyzes other new phenomena, ranging from the intimate sphere (i.e. video chats, personal blogs or journals on social networking websites) to the public arena (i.e. global-scale transmission of information and knowledge in public blogs or media-sharing communities), shedding light on the rapidly changing global web scenario.
This volume explores spoken and written discourse in English, accounting for the cultural, social... more This volume explores spoken and written discourse in English, accounting for the cultural, social and linguistic implications of variation across speech and writing. It outlines the history of orality and literature from various culturaland historical standpoints, explaining why this interplay is the driving force behind far-ranging ideologies, which have contributed to the division betweenoraland written cultures. The latter have deployed their repertoire of literacy resourcesto educate but also dominate illiterate populations. Speech and writing are subsequently analysed from a linguistic standpoint, discussing a range of genres and their related linguistic features, such as contextualization vs. autonomy, presence vs. absence, involvement vs. detachment, repetition vs. concisionand evanescence vs. permanence. Speech and writing, however, are not studied as opposing or conflicting notions, but are seen as flexible, interacting language modes that are enactedin different configurations and along different dimensions in texts. Finally, the book singles out aspects relevant to the contemporary world of web-based communication, reviewing linguistic features and discussing how these are changed and altered in digital environments.
Speech and writing are still significant linguistic paradigms that shed light on a range of cultural and linguistic meaning-making events.
This book provides a concise and easily accessible introduction to systemic-functional grammar wi... more This book provides a concise and easily accessible introduction to systemic-functional grammar with its student-friendly exposition and critical points of analysis for classroom and individual use, grounding functional theories in examples taken from authentic contemporary texts, such as newspapers articles, movie scripts and blogs. The book also introduces key theories to multimodal studies, subsequently devoting the applicative sections to text analysis for classroom discussion. This final section thus facilitates guided study by providing suggestions for textual explorations on a range of mainly web-based examples, such as YouTube videos, digital adverts, horoscopes, emails and websites, combining systemic-functional language analysis and multimodal approaches to contemporary communication and interaction.
With its broad, far-ranging approach, clear and detailed theoretical explanations, text analyses, classroom activities and suggested readings, this coursebook has proved to be invaluable for students and teachers in the fields of linguistics, social sciences, media and communication studies, political sciences and humanities.
In the past few years much theoretical debate has explored several cultural issues in the Angloph... more In the past few years much theoretical debate has explored several cultural issues in the Anglophone Caribbean, focusing on the central experience of colonialism as well as on the contemporary postcolonial condition and the possible formation of neo-colonial configurations. Some of the constituent traits of the Caribbean experience are dealt with in this study, such as the relationship between the Caribbean and Great Britain from a cultural and literary perspective in the twentieth century, multiculturalism and ethnicity, the interplay of orality and literature and an investigation of linguistic issues, in particular the creolization of the English language under world influences. Different strands are brought together in the analysis of Sam Selvon's London trilogy--The Lonely Londoners, Moses Ascending and Moses Migrating, considering questions of identity for ex-colonials in the crucial years between the end of World War II and the 1980s in Britain, relationships between European versus African and Indian cultural heritage, clash of cultures as represented via language, ideas of national identity as an imaginative process also reflecting dynamics of power inside society. The use of Creole represents an ideal clinging to Caribbean modes of cultural survival, which is also buttressed by the postcolonial contamination of the traditional Western bourgeois genre, the novel. After the colonial demise, the genre of the novel mirrors approaches of communication more oral-oriented than those linked to Western written aesthetic values, and the strategies used by Selvon are surveyed to show the interrelationships between language, power, literature and cultural identities. The London trilogy is analysed according to linguistic, literary and cultural paradigms, shedding lights on the relevance of Selvon's work for the construction of a culturally independent Caribbean literature.
Papers in Journals by Maria Grazia Sindoni
Lingue e linguaggi, 2018
After the 2015 Paris attacks, hate speech against Muslims gathered momentum and further legitimiz... more After the 2015 Paris attacks, hate speech against Muslims gathered momentum and further legitimized in popular media outlets across Europe. After “decades of sustained and unrestrained anti-foreigner abuse, misinformation and distortion”, the United Nations accused some British newspapers of “hate speech” (ECRI 2016). Following on previous research (Sindoni 2016, 2017), this paper sets out to investigate how hate speech in mainstream British media is constructed both verbally and multimodally, with particular reference to the investigation of rhetoric inducing anti-Muslim and Islamophobic hatred. The paper adopts a multimodal critical discourse framework of analysis (Fairclough 2000; Machin, Mayr 2012). As a case study, the “1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis” The Sun’s editorial reporting on a poll conducted by Survation and related multimodal materials will be investigated with a view to unearthing 1) linguistic strategies, such as classification of social actors, including, but not limited to, personalisation vs. impersonalisation, data aggregation, and structural opposition (van Leeuwen 1996; van Dijk 1993b); 2) visual strategies (Kress, van Leeuwen 2006; Bednarek, Caple 2012, 2015), including representational techniques (e.g. reactional processes, dimensional and quantitative topography), interactive perspectives, and organisational distribution of visual items. Considering the combination of linguistic and visual news value (Bell 1991; Bednarek, Caple 2014), the paper will ultimately suggest that 1) resources need to be investigated in their reciprocal interplay to scrutinize the covert agenda of media outlets that may promote indirect forms of hate speech and that 2) less explicit forms of hate speech are no less dangerous than explicit incitement to racial hatred in that they can foster a siege mentality by drawing on an us/them rhetoric.
This paper adopts a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) approach to analyse how meaning... more This paper adopts a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) approach to analyse how meanings are produced and circulated in British major corporate digital media outlets via the multimodal notion of transduction (Kress 1997; Mavers 2011; Newfi eld 2014). Transduction is a form of translation from one semiotic system to another one, for example from verbal language to images and vice versa. However, transductions cannot be interpreted as mere transferrals from one resource to another one, and are here interpreted as multiplying meanings (Lemke 2002). As a case study, this paper will select some online columns from the Telegraph and the Guardian, drawing from a monitor corpus that is under construction to date and that includes multimodal data from the British digital press reporting on the " European migrant crisis " in 2015. The columns selected for this study deal with how people on the move are and/ or should be labelled (e.g. Migrants? Refugees? Asylum seekers? Potential terrorists? See Gabrielatos, Baker 2008; Baker et al. 2008). The columns will be commented qualitatively from a multimodal critical discourse framework of analysis, with the goal of shedding light on how pictorial materials (e.g. pictures and diagrams) can amplify, reduce or even contradict what is argued in the verbal text. In the conclusive remarks, some refl ections will be presented with a view to possible future lines of research.
This paper introduces the Special Issue on the languages of performing arts and is therefore aime... more This paper introduces the Special Issue on the languages of performing arts and is therefore aimed at designing how the context of the latter can be illuminated by socio-semiotic and multimodal approaches to communication. In this Special Issue, performances and performing arts are described as multimodal semiotic acts that co-deploy a range of semiotic resources to produce and construct meanings across different cultures and ages. Seen as dynamic and interactive processes of meaning-making, their analysis calls for new and multidisciplinary frameworks which are collected in this Special Issue. The introduction gives an overview of these papers and discusses their range of diverse phenomena, both live and recorded, including theatre performances and films, art installations, opera, as well as reading out aloud. By outlining the significance and contribution of different disciplines and fields of studies to the broad area of performance studies, the chapter argues the case for innovative approaches that can extend theories and analyse aesthetic and performative practices in context. With the help of some case studies, it provides guidelines for the reading and interpretation of the several theoretical discussions and practical case studies presented to encourage further multidisciplinary research on these domains.
Since its early beginnings in Italy in the sixteenth century, opera has always been a multimodal ... more Since its early beginnings in Italy in the sixteenth century, opera has always been a multimodal text, integrating verbal, musical, and stage resources. Verbal resources can be unpacked in lyric verse for vocal pieces in closed form, narrative verse or prose for recitative, and stage directions; musical resources include
instrumental and vocal music, whereas stage resources incorporate stage design, singers’ and dancers’ kinesics, and set
and costume arrangements. However, opera has been rarely
studied in multimodal terms, as it has been mainly explored from musicological standpoints, hence prioritising music and barely taking into account the interplay of other resources. As a case study, epitomising the Golden Age of opera, La Cenerentola by Rossini has been selected, as it exemplifies how the theatrical and compositional conventions of the genre work concurrently with its metatextual components. Stage adaptations will be also analysed in two film operas, that is, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s La Cenerentola (Germany, 1981) and Carlo Verdone’s Cenerentola, Una favola in diretta (Italy, 2014). Opera will be interpreted as a prototype of multi-level resemiotisation, also in a critical light, as the libretto is
resemiotised (1) as a musical composition; (2) as a mise-en-scène, and (3) as a film opera.
Fandom is a growing phenomenon in the contemporary user-generated mediascape, inasmuch as it is c... more Fandom is a growing phenomenon in the contemporary user-generated mediascape, inasmuch as it is capitalizing on the unprecedented possibilities of publication, distribution and interaction made available by digital technologies (Hellekson, Busse 2006; Stein, Busse 2012). In transmedia storytelling, integral elements of a story are dispersed systematically across various delivery channels with the goal of creating a networked entertainment experience (Jenkins 2006, 2007). Stories are no longer experienced through linear narratives, but they are accessed through several “points of entries” that encourage a customized reading/viewing/writing practice: the global fanfiction experience. Fanfiction is explored of this study from two distinct but complementary theoretical and methodological standpoints. Building on previous studies on the matter (Thomas 2010; Sindoni 2013) and drawing on a mono-generic corpus, LJFic, the research questions that this paper addresses deal with diatypic variation (Halliday 1991) in fanfiction from both linguistic and multimodal perspectives. Keyness analyses have been carried out using two different reference corpora (FLOB and COCA), assuming that such analyses can shed light on a range of linguistic issues, for example with regard to spoken/written variation (approximating Biber’s MF/MD analysis, 1988) and with a focus on the most prominent lexical items for the investigation of the entries’ aboutness (Scott, Tribble 2006; Bondi, Scott 2010). However, a purely computational analysis cannot account for the multimodal nature of fanfiction. To fill this gap, a sample of entries will be analysed qualitatively, by unearthing and unpacking the multimodal resources involved.
Special issue "TECHNOLOGY-MEDIATED TASK-BASED ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING" edited by AnnaFranca Plastina, 2015
This paper reports on the first stage of an Italian national project, Access Thorough Text
(ACT ... more This paper reports on the first stage of an Italian national project, Access Thorough Text
(ACT henceforth), designed to respond to issues related to reading strategies, textual barriers
and online access to web texts in English in educational environments, with specific
reference to English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The first stage of the work has been
focused on the theoretical foundation on which the project is based, in particular giving
suggestions about how digital literacy for learners aged 6-18 can be encouraged and
facilitated in web-based multimodal platforms (Jones, Hafner 2012). An inventory of
integrative systems has been created to account for a range of devices that help break down
barriers in texts (Baldry, Gaggia, Porta, 2011; Gaggia 2012; Porta 2012). The second section
of this paper presents the design and administration of a needs analysis for the identification
of specific needs for the three targeted age groups of EFL learners (group 1: 6-10, group 2:
11-14; group 3: 15-18). The survey also investigates which best practices can be adopted with
regard to a) ease of access; b) awareness of sociocultural and genre-related textual barriers,
and c) language problems for EFL learners. This paper will focus on Group 3, i.e. learners
aged 15-18, and on how New Travel websites (NTWs) can be used in educational
environments through task-based activities.
Preliminary findings have shown that the text barriers identified in NTW can be
ascribed to different socio-semiotic, multimodal and linguistic areas. Multimodal corpora
have been created and annotated for the purpose of unpacking and tackling text barriers. The
rationale of corpora selection (Baldry, O’Halloran 2010), replicability of the experiment,
issues in categorization and taxonomies involved in NTWs will be discussed, with the final
goal of providing guidelines for teachers, parents and other stakeholders in the field of digital
literacy.
Paraphrasing Spivak’s essay, “Can the subaltern speak?” (1988),
this paper will discuss how blog... more Paraphrasing Spivak’s essay, “Can the subaltern speak?” (1988),
this paper will discuss how blogs can be manipulated by corporate
media at both a linguistic and multimodal level, analysing Malala
Yousafzai’s 2009 blog. Malala won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014
and is known for her activism in women’s rights, but critics have
questioned the authenticity of her voice, maintaining that her language
is not likely to be produced by a child. Th is paper will address
the question as to whether her blog has been manipulated, analysing
linguistic features - such as lexical density, readability, keyness, modality
markers in English, and multimodal resources. Linguistic and
visual data will be discussed to see how multimodal approaches to
communication can disentangle corporate mass media manipulation.
This paper provides a theoretical framework for the study of the videochat, a spontaneous web-bas... more This paper provides a theoretical framework for the study of the videochat, a spontaneous web-based synchronous text that allows forms of communication in which social semiotic resources come into play and produce a new terrain of investigation for researchers in the field of linguistics, multimodality, communication and media studies, visual ethnography and digital literacy. In particular, the paper singles out some aspects for analysis, such as the alternation of speech and writing, new proxemic and kinetic patterns, gaze management, and impossibility of eye contact and discusses some examples from digital field work on multiparty video-based interactions. Speech and writing are technologically integrated, allowing participants to mode-switch, i.e. to alternate between spoken and written discourse. New arrangements of verbal and non verbal resources attempt to simulate face-to-face conversations. However, the illusion of a face-to-face conversation dissolves as soon as videochat-specific resources are unpacked. Despite growing research into nonverbal behavior, videochat data challenge visual analysts and researchers for a number of reasons. A transcription model, developed for the purpose of analyzing these specific texts, will be sketched to give a brief account of significant data that need to be incorporated into multimodal transcription and annotation. Reflections and conclusions are drawn according to the contribution that intersemiotic studies can potentially provide for web text analysis, given the constant expansion of web-based texts and the challenge it brings as regards new notions of textuality.
"Is English for Linguistics (EL) a domain of interest for EAP? Is the metalanguage for linguistic... more "Is English for Linguistics (EL) a domain of interest for EAP? Is the metalanguage for linguistics (e.g. lexical precision, semantic and pragmatic appropriateness) sufficiently taught at university level? Which strategies are most appropriate when developing presentation skills with regard to language competence in the field of linguistics?
This paper sets out to address these questions, adopting the viewpoint that competence in EL is probably taken for granted at university level and less researched than it should be.
Strategies to encourage the development of this particular metalanguage, with reference to specific lexical items and semantic areas, are investigated in peer-assessment procedures,
which would seem to be particularly effective at postgraduate level when integrating syllabus content and language skills to negotiate and reflect critically on this aspect of EAP.
Despite general agreement over the usefulness and impact of peer-assisted educational strategies (Topping 1988; Falchikov 2001), there is a striking lack of experimentation on peer
assessment, especially when it comes to formal recognition and inclusion in university syllabuses within EAP practice. The rationale of this paper builds on a pilot project carried out
at the University of Messina (Italy) in 2010, in a course of English Linguistics for postgraduate students in Foreign Languages and Literatures in which systemic-functional and crosscultural
socio-semiotic approaches to multimodal studies (Baldry & Thibault 2006; Kress & van Leeuwen 2006) were the major focus of analysis. Part of the course consisted in the development of individual projects, assessed both by the teacher and their peers with the ultimate goal of developing reflective, linguistic, metalinguistic and presentation skills. Related issues are discussed, such as students’ development of assessment grids, the integration of contents and metalanguage, and the consistency between peer and teacher evaluations. This approach helps expand students’ language autonomy in articulating evaluative decisions and priorities regarding their own and their peers’ learning outcomes. The mastery of a specialized language is targeted both as regards discussing syllabus contents
and as regards expanding expertise in the field of linguistics."
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Books by Maria Grazia Sindoni
It describes what a successful digital literate European citizen must be able to do and understand in transnational digital environment.
CFRIDiL is divided into broad level groups, sub-divided into further levels, from breakthrough to proficiency. For each level, it includes descriptors which tells what a learner is supposed to be able to do in receptive and productive skills, in terms of digital literacy in international and intercultural contexts.
These systematic descriptors deal with the comprehension, production, and interpretation of the contemporary digital textuality for international and intercultural communication.
If CEFR descriptors illustrate language skills, and DigComp 2.0 descriptors illustrate digital skills as such, CFRIDiL descriptors focus on skills that include consideration of visual and auditory resources afforded in digital environments in relation to their meaning-making potential in international and intercultural contexts instead, hence including more comprehensive multimodal, sociosemiotic and critical skills that take into consideration the expectations of socioculturally diverse audience and contexts.
It describes what a successful digital literate European citizen must be able to do and understand in transnational digital environment.
CFRIDiL is divided into broad level groups, sub-divided into further levels, from breakthrough to proficiency. For each level, it includes descriptors which tells what a learner is supposed to be able to do in receptive and productive skills, in terms of digital literacy in international and intercultural contexts.
These systematic descriptors deal with the comprehension, production, and interpretation of the contemporary digital textuality for international and intercultural communication.
If CEFR descriptors illustrate language skills, and DigComp 2.0 descriptors illustrate digital skills as such, CFRIDiL descriptors focus on skills that include consideration of visual and auditory resources afforded in digital environments in relation to their meaning-making potential in international and intercultural contexts instead, hence including more comprehensive multimodal, sociosemiotic and critical skills that take into consideration the expectations of socioculturally diverse audience and contexts.
Typical modes of online interaction encompass speech, writing, gesture, movement, gaze, and social distance. This is nothing new, but here Sindoni asserts that all these modes are integrated in unprecedented ways, enacting new interactional patterns and new systems of interpretation among web users. These "non verbal" modes have been sidelined by mainstream linguistics, whereas accounting for the complexity of new genres and making sense of their educational impact is high on this volume’ s agenda. Sindoni analyzes other new phenomena, ranging from the intimate sphere (i.e. video chats, personal blogs or journals on social networking websites) to the public arena (i.e. global-scale transmission of information and knowledge in public blogs or media-sharing communities), shedding light on the rapidly changing global web scenario.
Typical modes of online interaction encompass speech, writing, gesture, movement, gaze, and social distance. This is nothing new, but here Sindoni asserts that all these modes are integrated in unprecedented ways, enacting new interactional patterns and new systems of interpretation among web users. These "non verbal" modes have been sidelined by mainstream linguistics, whereas accounting for the complexity of new genres and making sense of their educational impact is high on this volume’ s agenda. Sindoni analyzes other new phenomena, ranging from the intimate sphere (i.e. video chats, personal blogs or journals on social networking websites) to the public arena (i.e. global-scale transmission of information and knowledge in public blogs or media-sharing communities), shedding light on the rapidly changing global web scenario.
Speech and writing are still significant linguistic paradigms that shed light on a range of cultural and linguistic meaning-making events.
With its broad, far-ranging approach, clear and detailed theoretical explanations, text analyses, classroom activities and suggested readings, this coursebook has proved to be invaluable for students and teachers in the fields of linguistics, social sciences, media and communication studies, political sciences and humanities.
Papers in Journals by Maria Grazia Sindoni
instrumental and vocal music, whereas stage resources incorporate stage design, singers’ and dancers’ kinesics, and set
and costume arrangements. However, opera has been rarely
studied in multimodal terms, as it has been mainly explored from musicological standpoints, hence prioritising music and barely taking into account the interplay of other resources. As a case study, epitomising the Golden Age of opera, La Cenerentola by Rossini has been selected, as it exemplifies how the theatrical and compositional conventions of the genre work concurrently with its metatextual components. Stage adaptations will be also analysed in two film operas, that is, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s La Cenerentola (Germany, 1981) and Carlo Verdone’s Cenerentola, Una favola in diretta (Italy, 2014). Opera will be interpreted as a prototype of multi-level resemiotisation, also in a critical light, as the libretto is
resemiotised (1) as a musical composition; (2) as a mise-en-scène, and (3) as a film opera.
(ACT henceforth), designed to respond to issues related to reading strategies, textual barriers
and online access to web texts in English in educational environments, with specific
reference to English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The first stage of the work has been
focused on the theoretical foundation on which the project is based, in particular giving
suggestions about how digital literacy for learners aged 6-18 can be encouraged and
facilitated in web-based multimodal platforms (Jones, Hafner 2012). An inventory of
integrative systems has been created to account for a range of devices that help break down
barriers in texts (Baldry, Gaggia, Porta, 2011; Gaggia 2012; Porta 2012). The second section
of this paper presents the design and administration of a needs analysis for the identification
of specific needs for the three targeted age groups of EFL learners (group 1: 6-10, group 2:
11-14; group 3: 15-18). The survey also investigates which best practices can be adopted with
regard to a) ease of access; b) awareness of sociocultural and genre-related textual barriers,
and c) language problems for EFL learners. This paper will focus on Group 3, i.e. learners
aged 15-18, and on how New Travel websites (NTWs) can be used in educational
environments through task-based activities.
Preliminary findings have shown that the text barriers identified in NTW can be
ascribed to different socio-semiotic, multimodal and linguistic areas. Multimodal corpora
have been created and annotated for the purpose of unpacking and tackling text barriers. The
rationale of corpora selection (Baldry, O’Halloran 2010), replicability of the experiment,
issues in categorization and taxonomies involved in NTWs will be discussed, with the final
goal of providing guidelines for teachers, parents and other stakeholders in the field of digital
literacy.
this paper will discuss how blogs can be manipulated by corporate
media at both a linguistic and multimodal level, analysing Malala
Yousafzai’s 2009 blog. Malala won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014
and is known for her activism in women’s rights, but critics have
questioned the authenticity of her voice, maintaining that her language
is not likely to be produced by a child. Th is paper will address
the question as to whether her blog has been manipulated, analysing
linguistic features - such as lexical density, readability, keyness, modality
markers in English, and multimodal resources. Linguistic and
visual data will be discussed to see how multimodal approaches to
communication can disentangle corporate mass media manipulation.
This paper sets out to address these questions, adopting the viewpoint that competence in EL is probably taken for granted at university level and less researched than it should be.
Strategies to encourage the development of this particular metalanguage, with reference to specific lexical items and semantic areas, are investigated in peer-assessment procedures,
which would seem to be particularly effective at postgraduate level when integrating syllabus content and language skills to negotiate and reflect critically on this aspect of EAP.
Despite general agreement over the usefulness and impact of peer-assisted educational strategies (Topping 1988; Falchikov 2001), there is a striking lack of experimentation on peer
assessment, especially when it comes to formal recognition and inclusion in university syllabuses within EAP practice. The rationale of this paper builds on a pilot project carried out
at the University of Messina (Italy) in 2010, in a course of English Linguistics for postgraduate students in Foreign Languages and Literatures in which systemic-functional and crosscultural
socio-semiotic approaches to multimodal studies (Baldry & Thibault 2006; Kress & van Leeuwen 2006) were the major focus of analysis. Part of the course consisted in the development of individual projects, assessed both by the teacher and their peers with the ultimate goal of developing reflective, linguistic, metalinguistic and presentation skills. Related issues are discussed, such as students’ development of assessment grids, the integration of contents and metalanguage, and the consistency between peer and teacher evaluations. This approach helps expand students’ language autonomy in articulating evaluative decisions and priorities regarding their own and their peers’ learning outcomes. The mastery of a specialized language is targeted both as regards discussing syllabus contents
and as regards expanding expertise in the field of linguistics."
It describes what a successful digital literate European citizen must be able to do and understand in transnational digital environment.
CFRIDiL is divided into broad level groups, sub-divided into further levels, from breakthrough to proficiency. For each level, it includes descriptors which tells what a learner is supposed to be able to do in receptive and productive skills, in terms of digital literacy in international and intercultural contexts.
These systematic descriptors deal with the comprehension, production, and interpretation of the contemporary digital textuality for international and intercultural communication.
If CEFR descriptors illustrate language skills, and DigComp 2.0 descriptors illustrate digital skills as such, CFRIDiL descriptors focus on skills that include consideration of visual and auditory resources afforded in digital environments in relation to their meaning-making potential in international and intercultural contexts instead, hence including more comprehensive multimodal, sociosemiotic and critical skills that take into consideration the expectations of socioculturally diverse audience and contexts.
It describes what a successful digital literate European citizen must be able to do and understand in transnational digital environment.
CFRIDiL is divided into broad level groups, sub-divided into further levels, from breakthrough to proficiency. For each level, it includes descriptors which tells what a learner is supposed to be able to do in receptive and productive skills, in terms of digital literacy in international and intercultural contexts.
These systematic descriptors deal with the comprehension, production, and interpretation of the contemporary digital textuality for international and intercultural communication.
If CEFR descriptors illustrate language skills, and DigComp 2.0 descriptors illustrate digital skills as such, CFRIDiL descriptors focus on skills that include consideration of visual and auditory resources afforded in digital environments in relation to their meaning-making potential in international and intercultural contexts instead, hence including more comprehensive multimodal, sociosemiotic and critical skills that take into consideration the expectations of socioculturally diverse audience and contexts.
Typical modes of online interaction encompass speech, writing, gesture, movement, gaze, and social distance. This is nothing new, but here Sindoni asserts that all these modes are integrated in unprecedented ways, enacting new interactional patterns and new systems of interpretation among web users. These "non verbal" modes have been sidelined by mainstream linguistics, whereas accounting for the complexity of new genres and making sense of their educational impact is high on this volume’ s agenda. Sindoni analyzes other new phenomena, ranging from the intimate sphere (i.e. video chats, personal blogs or journals on social networking websites) to the public arena (i.e. global-scale transmission of information and knowledge in public blogs or media-sharing communities), shedding light on the rapidly changing global web scenario.
Typical modes of online interaction encompass speech, writing, gesture, movement, gaze, and social distance. This is nothing new, but here Sindoni asserts that all these modes are integrated in unprecedented ways, enacting new interactional patterns and new systems of interpretation among web users. These "non verbal" modes have been sidelined by mainstream linguistics, whereas accounting for the complexity of new genres and making sense of their educational impact is high on this volume’ s agenda. Sindoni analyzes other new phenomena, ranging from the intimate sphere (i.e. video chats, personal blogs or journals on social networking websites) to the public arena (i.e. global-scale transmission of information and knowledge in public blogs or media-sharing communities), shedding light on the rapidly changing global web scenario.
Speech and writing are still significant linguistic paradigms that shed light on a range of cultural and linguistic meaning-making events.
With its broad, far-ranging approach, clear and detailed theoretical explanations, text analyses, classroom activities and suggested readings, this coursebook has proved to be invaluable for students and teachers in the fields of linguistics, social sciences, media and communication studies, political sciences and humanities.
instrumental and vocal music, whereas stage resources incorporate stage design, singers’ and dancers’ kinesics, and set
and costume arrangements. However, opera has been rarely
studied in multimodal terms, as it has been mainly explored from musicological standpoints, hence prioritising music and barely taking into account the interplay of other resources. As a case study, epitomising the Golden Age of opera, La Cenerentola by Rossini has been selected, as it exemplifies how the theatrical and compositional conventions of the genre work concurrently with its metatextual components. Stage adaptations will be also analysed in two film operas, that is, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s La Cenerentola (Germany, 1981) and Carlo Verdone’s Cenerentola, Una favola in diretta (Italy, 2014). Opera will be interpreted as a prototype of multi-level resemiotisation, also in a critical light, as the libretto is
resemiotised (1) as a musical composition; (2) as a mise-en-scène, and (3) as a film opera.
(ACT henceforth), designed to respond to issues related to reading strategies, textual barriers
and online access to web texts in English in educational environments, with specific
reference to English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The first stage of the work has been
focused on the theoretical foundation on which the project is based, in particular giving
suggestions about how digital literacy for learners aged 6-18 can be encouraged and
facilitated in web-based multimodal platforms (Jones, Hafner 2012). An inventory of
integrative systems has been created to account for a range of devices that help break down
barriers in texts (Baldry, Gaggia, Porta, 2011; Gaggia 2012; Porta 2012). The second section
of this paper presents the design and administration of a needs analysis for the identification
of specific needs for the three targeted age groups of EFL learners (group 1: 6-10, group 2:
11-14; group 3: 15-18). The survey also investigates which best practices can be adopted with
regard to a) ease of access; b) awareness of sociocultural and genre-related textual barriers,
and c) language problems for EFL learners. This paper will focus on Group 3, i.e. learners
aged 15-18, and on how New Travel websites (NTWs) can be used in educational
environments through task-based activities.
Preliminary findings have shown that the text barriers identified in NTW can be
ascribed to different socio-semiotic, multimodal and linguistic areas. Multimodal corpora
have been created and annotated for the purpose of unpacking and tackling text barriers. The
rationale of corpora selection (Baldry, O’Halloran 2010), replicability of the experiment,
issues in categorization and taxonomies involved in NTWs will be discussed, with the final
goal of providing guidelines for teachers, parents and other stakeholders in the field of digital
literacy.
this paper will discuss how blogs can be manipulated by corporate
media at both a linguistic and multimodal level, analysing Malala
Yousafzai’s 2009 blog. Malala won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014
and is known for her activism in women’s rights, but critics have
questioned the authenticity of her voice, maintaining that her language
is not likely to be produced by a child. Th is paper will address
the question as to whether her blog has been manipulated, analysing
linguistic features - such as lexical density, readability, keyness, modality
markers in English, and multimodal resources. Linguistic and
visual data will be discussed to see how multimodal approaches to
communication can disentangle corporate mass media manipulation.
This paper sets out to address these questions, adopting the viewpoint that competence in EL is probably taken for granted at university level and less researched than it should be.
Strategies to encourage the development of this particular metalanguage, with reference to specific lexical items and semantic areas, are investigated in peer-assessment procedures,
which would seem to be particularly effective at postgraduate level when integrating syllabus content and language skills to negotiate and reflect critically on this aspect of EAP.
Despite general agreement over the usefulness and impact of peer-assisted educational strategies (Topping 1988; Falchikov 2001), there is a striking lack of experimentation on peer
assessment, especially when it comes to formal recognition and inclusion in university syllabuses within EAP practice. The rationale of this paper builds on a pilot project carried out
at the University of Messina (Italy) in 2010, in a course of English Linguistics for postgraduate students in Foreign Languages and Literatures in which systemic-functional and crosscultural
socio-semiotic approaches to multimodal studies (Baldry & Thibault 2006; Kress & van Leeuwen 2006) were the major focus of analysis. Part of the course consisted in the development of individual projects, assessed both by the teacher and their peers with the ultimate goal of developing reflective, linguistic, metalinguistic and presentation skills. Related issues are discussed, such as students’ development of assessment grids, the integration of contents and metalanguage, and the consistency between peer and teacher evaluations. This approach helps expand students’ language autonomy in articulating evaluative decisions and priorities regarding their own and their peers’ learning outcomes. The mastery of a specialized language is targeted both as regards discussing syllabus contents
and as regards expanding expertise in the field of linguistics."
American and ethnic stereotypes in inter-group and intra-group
perceptions (Trudgill 2002). The pilot phase was carried out between 2008 and 2009 and a second step was developed in 2013 and 2014. The overall aim of this study is to investigate how cultural and linguistic identities are constructed in multilanguage and multicultural environments, with specific reference to Italian American young adults, mainly of second generation.
The great variability that blogs exhibit has not yet been fully explored,
especially in terms of genre variation. This chapter attempts to redress this balance by undertaking a corpus-based analysis supported by a functional interpretation of lexical data in a subgenre that is still relatively unexplored: fandom blogs.
This paper explores variation across speech and writing in blogs on a purposely created corpus of c. 1 million words. Based on Halliday’s view on language modes and language mode variation (1987 [2002]), this work investigates how speech and writing are intertwined in hybrid digital texts, sampling blogs in networking communities (e.g. LiveJournal) as a case study.
Variation across speech and writing has been traditionally studied using multifeature/multidimensional analysis (cf. MF/MD analysis, Biber 1988). However, other studies attest that lexical-based corpus analyses can reliably approximate MF/MD results (Tribble 1999; Scott, Tribble 2006). Assuming that a lexico-grammatical approach can explain how the traditional categories of speech and writing are blended in blogging environments, this study reports on how the corpus has been built and explored to account for language mode variation, using keyness analysis and lexical bundle analysis (Sindoni in press).
Hybridity is a notion that has been invoked in some quarters to account for digital textuality, but will be applied in this study more specifically as resulting from oral, written and multimodal combinations of verbal and semiotic resources (Sindoni 2011). The widely accepted and somewhat vaguely defined assumption that blogs are hybrid texts will be thus scrutinized and eventually validated through empirical data.
Furthermore, video data analyses suggest that a model entirely based on writing fails to reproduce seminal aspects, such as kinesic and proxemic patterns or gaze vectors (Sindoni 2010). A more accurate model thus requires visual resources, such as screenshots and/or depiction.
The ensuing research questions are:
• How can this multiplicity of levels be tackled and what level needs to be foregrounded?
• What is the role of writing, screenshot and depiction in multimodal transcriptions?
Building on a three-year study, this paper contends that different contexts of video interactions require transcriptions based on an ad hoc combination of writing, screenshots and depiction (Sindoni in press). A two participant Skype conversation, for example, is very different from a multi-party video chat room (Sindoni 2011). However, both of them may be transcribed, accounting for resources used by participants, (e.g. speech, chat, gaze, etc.) and for the multiplicity of screen levels. Hence transcription needs to use written and/or visual descriptions accordingly. If compared with the alleged “objectivity” of screenshots, depiction preserves informants’ identities, who may feel exposed by the display of their “real selves” despite informed consent. Conversely, illustrations lack important information inscribed in screenshots and also reflect the analyst’s bias. Factors affecting transcription may also include informants’ feelings on the matter, technical issues or the analyst’s research agenda.
The study thus argues the case for a flexible model that combines available resources according to pre-conditions and research goals.
In particular, a top viewed and top rated non commercial video will be analyzed as a multimodal “master-text”, originating a wealth of “metatexts”, i.e. written comments. A corpus-driven study of a sample of ca. 70000 comments will provide insights into interactional dynamics within video-sharing communities and, more specifically, explore transitivity patterns with reference to the Hallidayan experiential metafunction. Despite the apparent randomness and breaking of the relevance maxim (Grice 1989) of such comments, a corpus-driven analysis gives evidence for relatively fixed categorizations on the grounds that transitivity patterns are regular and highly predictable. Examples of material, mental and relational processes endorse this heuristic interpretation.
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CFRIDiL includes a set of guidelines to describe levels of proficiency in digital communication in intercultural and international context.
It is integration to, and expansion of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (CEFR), the Digital Competence Framework for Citizens (DigComp 2.0), the Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters (AIE).
The research questions that this paper addresses are: does it still make sense to distinguish between speech and writing in the digital domains? How is spoken and written discourse changing in blogs? And also: assuming that web-based environments are made up of ensembles of complex semiotic resources, how to tackle such diversity and complexity?
Firstly, the basic concepts of multimodality, digital literacy and intercultural communication were introduced and taught in the five university contexts.
This was followed by a series of workshops and practical exercises and tutorials were delivered to focus on five digital text types. Students were then asked to produce one of the five digital texts, plus a paper that helped them to motivate their selection for their final assignment.
Students were paired with other students on the EU-MADE4LL platform to facilitate anonymous peer-assessment. Based on their results, the best achieving students had the opportunity to further practice their intercultural and digital skills in an international context.
We invite you to explore the activities, including the design of our overall syllabus, workshop practice, tasks, assignments and readings which make up the joint syllabus. Feedback, questions and criticism are very welcome.
We designed the syllabus in order to make it completely replicable and flexible, so that it may fit different needs, fields of studies, students and contexts.