Multimodal practices of unpacking and repacking subject-specific knowledge in CLIL physics and chemistry lessons

Abstract

Background: Different school subjects have their specific meaning-making practices for building and conveying knowledge. Research drawing on the Semantics dimension of the Legitimation Code Theory has noted the importance of shifting between levels of abstraction and context-dependency in knowledge-building. There is a need to better understand how such shifting between different levels of abstraction is accomplished with multimodal resources in classroom interaction.

Aims: This study aims at exploring subject-specific knowledge construction as a form of translanguaging, i.e., as movement between different registers and multimodal resources of meaning-making.

Data: The data comes from a Finnish teacher development project aimed at supporting CLIL teachers’ professional development. This exploratory study analyses teachers’ knowledge-building practices in two STEM lessons video-recorded in the project, Physics and Chemistry.

Methods: The data is analysed using multimodal conversation analysis and analysis of semantic waves. Analysis focuses on how the teachers engage in unpacking and repacking subject-specific knowledge by talking, gesturing, as well as displaying, handling, and modifying various kinds of multimodal materials and artefacts.

Results: The teachers were found to use a versatile set of multimodal translanguaging practices for unpacking and repacking. The findings also indicate complexity in semantic waves due to multimodal resources accomplishing simultaneous shifts in semantic gravity and density, with either aligning or diverging functions.

Conclusions: The simultaneous use of different multimodal resources and their potential to serve different functions point to the need to acknowledge the multidimensionality of semantic waves. The multimodal translanguaging approach also has implications for conceptualising subject-specific knowledge-building as inherently multimodal.