Workshop
IMPLEMENTING A LANGUAGE AS SOCIAL SEMIOTIC APPROACH TO WRITING DEVELOPMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION
1 2 Caroline Coffin , Jim Donohue
1
The Open University, UK. Queen Mary, University of London, UK
2
Coming from the perspective that Language is a social semiotic which fuses linguistic form and meaning, this workshop will offer participants the opportunity to grapple with this ‘troublesome’ (Meyer & Land, 2005) ‘threshold concept’. The workshop will explore what it means to shift the attention away from writing and language development to meaning development.
The workshop will begin with an illustrative case study of work carried out at The Open University, UK, and then participants will be invited to share experiences of seeking to influence institutional strategy in relation to academic writing in their own institutions. Participants will then analyse two student texts from a meaningmaking perspective and exchange perspectives on what the process tells us about influencing our institutions to recognise the centrality of academic writing in teaching and learning.
The workshop will draw on concepts of semiotic mediation (Vygotsky, 1978), semantic orientation (Hasan, 2009) and language as a social semiotic (Halliday & Mathiessen, 2004).
References
Coffin, C and Donohue, J (2014) A language as social semiotic approach to teaching and learning in higher education (Language Learning Monograph Series). Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Also Language Learning 64 (Supplement 1).
Halliday, M.A.K. & Mathiessen, C.M.I.M (2004). An introduction to functional grammar. London: Edward Arnold.
Hasan, R. (2009). Semantic variation: Meaning in society and sociolinguistics. London: Equinox.
Meyer, J.H.F., & Land, R. (2005). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning. Higher Education, 49(3), 373388.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.