Embodied movement as a stratified semiotic mode: how movement, gaze and speech mean together in the classroom

Abstract This paper develops a model to map out embodied movement as a stratified semiotic mode, that is, a conventionalized set of resources for meaning making. The model describes movement structure as a system that realizes specific meanings activated by contexts of situation. The model establishes an explicit link between contextual meanings and textual patterning by theorizing connections between genre, metafunction, and structure. Drawing upon an empirical study of one teacher’s embodied movement in the classroom, this paper maps out movement structure as distinct choices and reveals how movement, gaze and speech function rhythmically to construe information prominence and information boundaries at different levels of discourse organization, which further contributes to coherence and periodicity for the information flow and semantic flow in the lesson. Additionally, the paper reveals that the synthesis of different modes can enact semantic convergence and divergence to aggregate knowledge in pedagogic contexts. The analysis contributes to a systematic understanding of the types of meaning that embodied movement can realize and of the ways in which they are realized together with speech and gaze. The intertwined nature of movement structures, meanings and contexts also indicates that pedagogy is an embodied and situated construction.