Multimodal Interaction in Media Discourse: Spatial, Verbal and Visual Acts in JK Live Talk Show

Technology has significantly transformed how texts are imagined and produced, leading to the emergence of multimodal texts such as films, TV talk shows, TV advertisements, social media platforms and books, among others. The communicative purposes of these texts highly depend on the integration of social semiotic modes. TV talk shows, as one form of such texts, showcase a complex interplay of these resources. This paper presents an analysis of the actions and interactions of semiotic modes in the Jeff Koinange’s talk show—JK Live, a prime-time televised program hosted by Jeff Koinange on Citizen TV, Kenya. Four episodes of the show were purposively selected and downloaded from Citizen TV’s YouTube channel for content analysis. Observation and focus group discussions were used as data collection instruments. Guided by Kress and van Leeuwen’s Multimodal Discourse Analysis, the study investigated how the host, guests and production team, as the participants in the show, strategically orchestrate space, speech and visual acts as multimodal resources to fulfil communicative functions within the show’s discourse. The findings of this study demonstrate how communication in the JK Live show is not merely verbal but depends on the interaction of other semiotic modes utilised by participants to shape the different. The findings contribute to the understanding of TV talk shows as highly interactive multimodal texts.