Date of Award
2021-05-01
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
English Rhetoric and Composition
Advisor(s)
Beth Brunk-Chavez
Abstract
Informed by social semiotics, multimodality and multimodal critical discourse studies, Mode Blending as Meaning-Making Process in First-Year Composition: A Multimodal and Multiperspective Critical Discourse Analysis of Student-Generated Brochures investigates how undergraduate students as sign makers explore different semiotic resources, select certain semiotic resources over others and negotiate their own interests with teacher instructions during meaning-making process. Based on the analysis of data gathered from multiple interviews with first year students and their instructors, classroom observations and analysis of student and teacher artifacts, I argue that students' composition is constituted by various semiotic modes such as images, colors, murals, symbols, icons, memes, typographies, gestures, spaces and words, and, more importantly, the selection of these resources is largely governed by students' own cultural, political and social ideologies, identities, values, beliefs, motivations and interests. The findings of my research challenge the hegemony of western logocentrism that privileges words over other semiotic resources such as images, spaces, sounds, symbols, gestures and spaces. Likewise, they complicate the findings of social semioticians who make definitive knowledge claims about â??trueâ?? meaning and representation of semiotic resources and universalize them without necessarily including the voices from the research site. Additionally, and more importantly, they expose the limitations of extant coding methods on multimodal composition as they were essentially designed to analyze verbal texts. The inadequacy of existing methods spurred me to devise a multimodal and multiperspective critical approach to data analysis, which involves multiple perspectives of the researcher, research participants and the scholars in the discipline to triangulate and enhance the credibility of findings.
Language
en
Provenance
Received from ProQuest
Copyright Date
2021-05
File Size
227 p.
File Format
application/pdf
Rights Holder
Shuv Raj Rana Bhat
Recommended Citation
Rana Bhat, Shuv Raj, "Mode Blending as Meaning-Making Process in First-Year Composition: A Multimodal and Multiperspective Critical Discourse Analysis of Student-Generated Brochures" (2021). Open Access Theses & Dissertations. 3327.
https://scholarworks.utep.edu/open_etd/3327