This collection offers a thorough treatment of the ways in which the verbal and visual semiotic modes interrelate toward promoting gender equality and social inclusion in children’s picture books. Drawing on cutting-edge theoretical work in multimodality, including multimodal cognitive linguistics, multimodal discourse analysis, and visual social semiotics, the book expands on descriptive-oriented studies to offer a more linguistically driven perspective on children’s picture books. The volume explores the choice afforded to and the lexico-semantic and discursive strategies employed by writers and illustrators in conveying representational, interpersonal, and textual meanings in the verbal and non-verbal components in these narratives in order to challenge gender stereotypes and promote the social inclusion of same-sex parent families. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in multimodality, discourse analysis, social semiotics, and children’s literature. Chapters 1 & 8 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com.

The chapters included in this book take the most relevant systemic-functional and visual social semiotic theories a step further from previous studies and apply them to the genre of children's tales.

This book offers a new framework for analysing textbook discourse, bridging the gap between contemporary ethnographic approaches and multimodality for a contextually sensitive approach which considers the multiplicity of multimodal resources involved in the production and use of textbooks. The volume makes the case for textbook discourse studies to go beyond studies of textual representation and critically consider the ways in which textbook discourse is situated within wider social practices. Each chapter considers a different social semiotic practice in which textbook and textbook discourse is involved: representation, communication, interaction, learning, and recontextualization. In bringing together this work with contemporary ethnography scholarship, the book offers a comprehensive toolkit for further research on textbook discourse and pushes the field forward into new directions. This innovative book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in discourse analysis, multimodality, social semiotics, language and communication, and curriculum studies.

Viral Language considers a range of different types of public communication and their discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic as a way to investigate health communication. The authors introduce and apply a range of approaches informed by linguistic theory to investigate experiences of the pandemic across a variety of public contexts. In doing so, they demonstrate how experiences of health and illness can be shaped by political messaging, scientific research, news articles and advertising. Through a series of case studies of Covid-related texts, the authors consider aspects of language instruction, information and innovation, showcasing the breadth of topics that can be studied as part of health communication. Furthermore, each case study provides practical guidance on how to carry out investigations using social media texts, how to analyse metaphor, how to track language innovation and how to work with text and images. Viral Language is critical reading for postgraduate and upper undergraduate students of applied linguistics and health communication.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of our everyday lives – from the political to the economic to the social. Using a multimodal discourse analysis approach, this dynamic collection examines various discourses, modes and media in circulation during the early stages of the pandemic, and how these have impacted our daily lives in terms of the various meanings they express. Examples include how national and international news organisations communicate important information about the virus and the crisis, the public’s reactions to such communications, the resultant (counter-)discourses as manifested in social media posts and memes, as well as the impact social distancing policies and mobility restrictions have had on people’s communication and interaction practices. The book offers a synoptic view of how the pandemic was communicated, represented and (re-)contextualised across different spheres, and ultimately hopes to help account for the significant changes we are continuing to witness in our everyday lives as the pandemic unfolds. This volume will appeal primarily to scholars in the field of (multimodal) discourse analysis. It will also be of interest to researchers and graduate students in other fields whose work focuses on the use of multimodal artefacts for communication and meaning making.

This collection critically considers the question of how learning and teaching should be conceived, understood, and approached in light of the changing nature of learning scenarios and new pedagogies in this current age of multimodal digital texts, practices, and communities. The book takes the concept of digital artifacts as being composed of multiple meaning-making semiotic resources, such as visuals, music, and design, as its point of departure to explore how diverse communities interact with these tools and develop and explore their understanding of digital practices in learning contexts. The first section of the volume examines different case studies in which involved participants learn to grapple with the introduction of digital tools for learning in children’s early years of schooling. The second section extends the focus to secondary and higher education settings as digital learning tools grow more complex as do students, parents, and teachers’ interactions with them and the subsequent need for new pedagogies to rethink these multimodal artifacts. A final section reflects on the implications of new multimodal tools, technologies, and pedagogies for teachers, such as on teacher training and community building among educators. In its in-depth look at multimodal approaches to learning as meaning-making in a digital world, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in multimodality, English language teaching, digital communication, and education.