Sheffield Hallam University

This event and all future SIOE seminars have been suspended until further notice, due to the current corona virus situation.

Presented by Arianna Maiorani, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Loughborough University.

Wed, 18 March 2020, 16:30 – 18:00
Room 12.4.19, Charles Street Building, Sheffield Hallam University

This talk is based on years of experience in teaching an Introduction to Multimodality module to second year students coming from very different curricula at Loughborough University.

The design and delivery of this module was intended to solidify the identity of students in a highly variegated and newly created school but it also created a series of serious challenges due not only to the very diverse backgrounds of participants but also to the very different teaching and learning practices to which they were used. Students were very interested in the topics offered by the module, which was oriented towards the exploration of communicative practices in different contexts and the acquisition of practical presentation skills. However, they started the module with diverse competences and expectations.

During my seminar I will show how through practice I eventually managed to deliver a module in which the teaching and learning activities, as well as the assessment package, generated a remarkable team-building activity where students from different backgrounds benefited from each other’s perspectives and approaches and used multimodal text analysis as an integrating platform.

The seminar will show how I tested the potential of different modes for interactive teaching to very heterogeneous groups of students and also how peer review on multimodal text analysis can bridge the gap between practice-based and theory-based learning activities. It will also show what type of group and individual assessment was the most effective and how working on multimodal text analysis helped all students develop different types of communicative resources.

Bionote

Arianna Maiorani is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at Loughborough University, where she teaches linguistics, semiotics and multimodality at various levels. Her research focuses on Multimodal Discourse Analysis and the application of the Systemic Functional Linguistic framework to the study of multimodal communication contexts and hyper-environments. Her forthcoming volume Kinesemiotics (Routledge, 2020) is based on her interdisciplinary research in collaboration with the English National Ballet.

Please book your place using the Eventbrite link below...