Knowledge dissemination and ideological stance in ESP settings

This contribution leverages data from the ESP Video Clip Corpus compiled by the Pisa research unit that focuses on the interplay between knowledge dissemination and multimodal literacy in ESP settings. The multimodal corpus contains a variety of digital genres for knowledge dissemination across specialized discourse domains of interest of ESP students. It is a multi-layered resource comprised of digital video clips, annotated transcripts, and corresponding sets of teaching notes. The talk will deal with some excerpts from an MIT OpenCourseWare video lecture on microeconomics delivered by Professor Jonathan Gruber who served as key consultant in the Obama administration for the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare”. Drawing on notions of multimodal critical discourse analysis (Ledin & Machin, 2018), I present a preliminary analysis to explore how this lecturer’s ideological stance manifests itself both linguistically and extra-linguistically, and thus contributes to expressing ideological meanings that can shape social practices. The findings can be applied to ESP settings in order to foster multimodal literacy (Walsh 2010) as a way to help L2 students exploit a wider set of semiotic resources beyond verbal language to cope with the linguistic and pragmatic challenges of domain-specific language, but also to encourage them to engage with ideological meanings within a broader social and cultural context.