Multimodality Across Communicative Settings, Discourse Domains and Genres

This volume provides a series of studies that focus on multimodality in various communicative settings, with special attention to how non-verbal elements reinforce and/or add meaning to verbal expressions. Following an introductory chapter that presents an overview of the topic and summarizes the individual contributions, which have all been newly commissioned, the volume is structured into two parts. The five chapters in the first part explore issues related to the use of multimodal resources in educational interactions and English language classroom teaching, also involving learners with disabilities. In the four chapters of the second part, multimodality is investigated as a key component of communication that takes place in different specialized domains (e.g. political discourse, legal discourse) and genres (e.g. fictional genres such as films, animated films, TV series vs. authentic forms of communication, such as political interviews and courtroom trials). The contributions reflect a variety of methodological approaches that are grounded in both quantitative and qualitative techniques. These include multimodal discourse analysis, multimodal transcription, and multimodal annotation software capable of representing the interplay of different semiotic modes, i.e. speech, intonation, direction of gaze, facial expressions, hand/arm gesturing, and spatial positioning of interlocutors. The research of the contributors to this volume highlights the increasingly important role of multimodality in communication across different genres and discourse communicative contexts, and offers new perspectives on how to exploit multimodal resources to enhance the learning of English for both general and specific purposes.