Accessibility in applied linguistics and medicine infographics: A comparative study of rhetorical moves and multimodal features

Abstract An open science movement has been gaining traction within applied linguistics. As part of this movement, one key focus has involved making the work that applied linguists do accessible, with accessibility referring to making research/findings available, non-technical, and meaningful to different stakeholders such as the public and practitioners. One way this has been addressed, both in applied linguistics and other fields, is through leveraging multimodal genres such as infographics to distill complex information and convey it in a concise manner. In this article, we examine the meaning-making strategies employed by researchers in applied linguistics and medicine to further understand how different fields leverage semiotic resources to make information accessible. Specifically, this study compares two corpora of infographics (N = 70) by conducting (1) a rhetorical move analysis, and (2) a Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis of the semiotic resources that constitute the moves. The findings show both similarities and large differences in the way researchers in applied linguists and medicine convey information. Implications are discussed broadly in terms of accessibility and open science.