Embodied readings: the multimodal social semiotic work of the English classroom

In this chapter, I continue to describe, and account for, the work that is involved in the reading of literature in urban English classrooms.1 In paying close attention to these events, I suggest that the richness of the cultural work that takes place in the classroom demands a theoretical synthesis of, as it were, old and new semiotics: to make sense of these English classrooms, to describe and theorise the reading that is accomplished in them, we need to use both the multimodal lens of recent social semiotics and Bakhtinian perspectives on language and culture.