Lim, Fei Victor

The Three Minute Thesis (3MT) is an academic competition that challenges graduate students to explain their research in 3 minutes to a non-specialist audience. While there have been a few studies examining rhetorical moves and interactional metadiscourse in 3MT presentations, studies focusing on features related to comprehensibility, a key competition requirement, have been lacking. This study examines how highly-specialised research is made comprehensible to non-specialist audiences through “code glosses”, communication strategies that function to facilitate understanding by reformulating, explaining, or elaborating on what has been said (Hyland, 2005). Analysing a corpus of 50 successful 3MT presentations in the electrical and computer engineering discipline, we found code glosses to be one of the most frequently used interactive metadiscourse types in the data. Significantly, Analogies and Definitions emerged as salient-enough features in our data that we added them as additional categories of code gloss, extending Hyland's (2007) two categories of Exemplifiers and Reformulators. Our analysis shows how examples, definitions, analogies, and reformulations are used in distinct ways in 3MT presentations to make the presented research accessible, coherent, and engaging to audiences. Our findings expand current understandings of code glosses, and extend the current knowledge on the 3MT genre by providing insights into its distinctive linguistic features vis-à-vis comprehensibility.

A challenge for researchers working with multimodal classroom discourse is to be able to describe and discuss the interaction and interplay across various semiotic resources. This article adopts the Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach to examine the relationship between language and gesture used by the teacher, in interaction with the students, and the emergent meanings made multimodally. It discusses the mechanisms by which language and gesture combine to make meaning by extending concepts originally developed for language–image relations. From the analysis and interpretation of the teachers’ multimodal selections in the lesson, the emergent meaning of ‘structured informality’ is proposed. Structured informality offers a way to consider how a teacher can design an effective learning experience for their students using multimodal resources.

While the use of video recording as a method of data collection has helped researchers to resolve the challenge of capturing classroom interactions between teachers and students, it can be challenging for the researchers and teachers to make sense of the rich data collected. This paper describes an approach of analysing and visualising a language lesson with lesson microgenre and network graphs to provide an overview map of the lesson enactment. Studying the language lesson from a lesson microgenre perspective can provide both the co-text and context of the lesson when specific segments of the lesson are identified for interpretation and reflection by the teacher. The lesson map is visualised using network graphs to show the progression, connections, and patterns of the lesson microgenres. The paper describes the application of the approach in a study of the English lessons conducted by two teachers in a Singapore primary school and discuss the implications of the approach on teacher training.

Technology has enabled new ways of meaning-making in the digital age, incidentally bringing with it inequities in education as a result of the differing access, resources, and experiences of students. These inequities may be rendered invisible if society and schools neither recognize, value nor set out to include in formal education the meaning-making practices from students’ lifeworlds. Such neglect can perpetuate the digital divide among students from diverse home backgrounds. The reform agenda of multiliteracies is to bring about educational justice through a pedagogy of access. In this paper, we discuss how this agenda can be operationalized in the frontline of education—the classroom. We propose a pedagogic metalanguage of transpositional grammar for the learning of multimodal literacy. “Transposition” refers to the process of moving between different forms of meaning (text, image, space, object, body, sound and speech), and changes of attention to their functions (reference, agency, structure, context and interest). In particular, we show the value of having a common shared conceptual framework with which to reflect upon and unpack multimodal meaning in terms of its forms and functions. We also describe how a repertoire of knowledge processes, rebalancing the cognitive and the socio-material, affective and embodied, can support teachers in their design for students’ multimodal literacy learning. We argue that attention to multimodal literacy in the curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment can be productively supported with a pedagogic metalanguage of transpositional grammar and discuss how this can be a step towards mediating the invisible inequities in education in the digital age.

Multiliteracies has been incorporated in the curriculum of many education systems around the world. Beyond the broadening of focus in literacy to include multimodal meaning‐making, multiliteracies pedagogies are also associated with certain pedagogical shifts, such as a focus on bridging the students' out‐of‐school literacy practices with what and how they are learning in school. This often involves appropriating social media as well as introducing popular culture topics in the classroom. This article discusses the students' perspectives of these ideas to inform the teacher's design of multiliteracies learning. Drawing on data collected through surveys and focus group discussions from a multi‐phased research project on multiliteracies in Singapore, we reflect on the students' expressions of their experiences and expectations on multiliteracies learning. In particular, we surface an instrumental view of learning where concerns over examinations and future career prospects cloud the students' learning. We also identify a desire among the students to keep their worlds of home and schools separate. While the discussion of the students' perspectives is anchored in the context of Singapore, the implications contribute to the global discourse among curriculum planners, educational researchers and teacher practitioners who are interested in improving the design of multiliteracies learning in their contexts.

With the COVID-19 pandemic and the advancements made in digital technology, there is a growing interest amongst educators in how to design online learning experiences for students. This chapter introduces the role of teachers as designers of learning and discusses the importance of their use of semiotic technologies for the representation of knowledge, enactment of pedagogic relations, and the organization of students’ learning. It also explores how students make meaning using words and other multimodal resources during online learning. In particular, the chapter focuses on the use of semiotic technologies of social media, using the example of Edmodo, for the design of synchronous online learning experiences in higher education. Based on reflections on the design and implementation of the lessons, the chapter reports on how synchronous learning experiences with social media can encourage collaborative knowledge-building amongst students and offer opportunities for their digital multimodal composing to learn and to express their learning. This understanding can inform researchers on the extent to which the digital medium enables and limits ways of meaning-making. The chapter presents a case for how the affordances of digital tools, such as the popular social media platforms, can be harnessed in the design of meaningful learning experiences.

In a constantly shifting world of increasing literacy expectations, technological advancements and global flows, school libraries as learning hubs are crucial to support students’ reading and learning. Following an earlier study documenting the positive impact of well-designed and stocked school libraries on students’ reading, the research team, with the support of CPDD, MOE and the three schools in the study, embarked on a library redesign project from 2019 to 2020. An ERPF grant, DEV02-20 Designing School Libraries of the Future, awarded to the research team, allowed the team to document the redesign process and study the impact of library redesign at the three Library of the Future (LOTF) prototype schools for one full year each between 2022 and 2023.

Cultivating teachers to be active and agentic learners is crucial for contemporary teacher education (Lipponen & Kumpulainen, 2011). Those teachers’ qualities are essential in preparing students’ future readiness in an increasingly complex world (P21 Framework Definitions, 2015). In fact, both learning principles and evidence from practice inform us that purposeful collaboration in networked learning communities (NLCs) encourage teacher agency to learn (Lieberman & Wood, 2003; Muijs, West & Ainscow, 2010). As a complement to the literature, we are interested in the development of social relationships among teachers, which enables and facilitates their learning. We propose “laterality” – the relations and networks among peers (e.g., teachers) as an important concept to characterize NLCs.
Studies on laterality, which have shown to support teacher learning, are usually found in the decentralized systems where individuals are the best entities to form these networks to support each other’s growth (Hargreaves & Goodman, 2006; Muijs et al., 2010). Thus, developing laterality from the bottom-up becomes natural in the decentralized contexts (Granovetter, 1973). Despite considerable theoretical promise of laterality and its increasing prevalence in practice, we wonder whether teacher laterality matters in the centralized education systems, and if it does, how it grows.