ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the design of the specific stages of a lesson through the teacher’s multimodal pedagogic discourse. It invites reflections on how different types of meaning-making activities within a lesson can be examined. Through exploring how the lens of multimodal social semiotics can help us understand pedagogic discourse, the value of identifying distinct stages in a lesson, described as ‘lesson microgenres’, is made. The lesson microgenres offer a way for the teacher to reflect on the types and nature of discourses occurring in the classroom. The categorisation of the lesson into specific multimodal pedagogic discourses also provides an analytical frame for educational researchers to understand, study, and compare across lessons, as the lesson microgenres facilitate the visualisation of patterns of lesson microgenres in each lesson. Data from a case study of the lesson conducted by two Singapore teachers is used to describe how the lesson microgenres can be expressed in the classroom through the teacher’s pedagogic discourse.
