ABSTRACT
Teaching and learning involve the teachers’ multimodal orchestration of meaning-making resources (Jewitt, 2008). In embodied teaching, the teacher designs the students’ learning experience with an apt use of semiotic resources, such as gestures, positioning, and movement, as well as (digital) tools (Lim, 2021a). While traditional EMI research has tended to focus on the teachers’ and students’ use of language, it is increasingly contextual that a multimodal analysis of classroom discourse can be productive in eliciting a deeper understanding of the pedagogic interaction. The ease in the collection of video data of the lesson also offers the researchers rich multimodal data for analysis. The challenge is in analysing and interpreting the big data collected from the video recordings of the EMI lesson. In this chapter, I describe an approach to conduct multimodal classroom discourse analysis. In particular, I propose the frameworks to analyse the teachers’ use of gestures (Lim, 2019, 2021b) and spatial pedagogy (Lim et al., 2012) from a social semiotics perspective (Halliday, 1978; Kress, 2010; O'Halloran, 2011). One feature of multimodal discourse analysis is its fine-grained examination of the specific choices and meanings made (Flewitt, 2006). The selection for close analysis is contextualised using Christie’s (2002) Curriculum Genre Theory and O'Halloran’s (2004) proposal of Lesson Microgenre applied to the EMI classroom (Lim, 2021a). I also outline the considerations in the data preparation, analysis and reporting in relation to the research questions drawing from the multimodal discourse analysis principles described in Jewitt et al. (2016). The goal of the multimodal classroom discourse analysis is to make ‘visible’ what has been typically neglected, but nonetheless, meaningful in pedagogic interactions. This chapter offers a suite of methodological tools towards this endeavour.
