Prior to the 5th International Webinar on Multimodal Discourse Analysis, the GRAPE group has been meeting with the invited researchers from abroad, allowing us to share perspectives, exchange research approaches and build networking opportunities for collaboration and joint research.
This week we had the opportunity to meet and discuss with Natasha Artemeva (Carleton University, Canada); Christoph A. Hafner (City University of Hong Kong, China); Fei Victor Lim (National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore).
These researchers, coming from different fields and backgrounds, have all in common an interest in multimodality, which connects them to our group.
While Dr. Artemeva’s main interest originally was written communication and genres, she became a researcher on multimodality ‘by accident’, while videorecording lectures in different disciplines, which made her realize of the potential and need of looking at discourse exploring all the semiotic modes. She is currently interested in Activity Theory, one of the main trends of research in North America, on which she gave a brief talk to our group this week.
Dr. Haffner has been working on multimodality from a pedagogical perspective, focusing on multimodal composing. His interest relies especially on ‘video proj ects’ from ESL university students in Hong Kong and their potential for learning English. In Haffner (2013) (https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.138), he explores EFL students’ autonomous work in making documentaries, and exploring the multimodal ensembles they create.
The topic of assessment and feedback has also come up when talking with Dr. Lim. Lim, former worker in the Ministry of Education of Singapore, conducted a project that sought to analyze how teachers teach multimodal literacy and is working on an assessment tool to explore and assess the lecturers’ (effective) multimodality communication.
In the following hours, Sophia Diamantopoulou (UCL Institute of Education, UK) and Rebekah Wegener (Universität Salzburg, Austria) will join us as well.
Dr. Diamantopoulou is a member of the UCL Centre for Multimodal Research and her interests and publications lie in the fields of visual communication, social semiotics, museum education, and embodied learning, while Dr. Wegener focuses on multimodal interaction in context, computer-mediated communication and human-computer interaction.
All these international researchers will join us on 16-17 November as invited speakers at the 5TH INTERNATIONAL WEBINAR ON MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS. You can find out more about our webinar on the website section ‘WEBINARS’.
