Investigating the role of trans-semiotizing in developing a literature review: meaning entanglement across multiple timescales

Abstract Developing a literature review (LR) is an essential step in nearly all academic and research work while also one of the most challenging tasks for graduate students and novice researchers. Scholars have proposed using visual tools to facilitate the development of LR. This involves trans-semiotizing – the dynamic process during which students coordinate and integrate languages and visual resources to construct and communicate academic information. However, relevant existing studies tended to focus on the textual analysis of students’ written or visual products, without paying attention to how students trans-semiotize in the academic writing process. The present study fills this gap by examining three graduate students’ perceptions and practices of trans-semiotizing in the process of developing an LR throughout a six-month English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course, where diagrammatic representations were systematically incorporated as a pedagogical intervention. Data were collected from classroom observation, students’ multimodal writing assignments and drafts, and interviews and informal communication with the students before, during and after the course. The findings illustrate that through learning and practicing with different diagrammatic representations, the students developed some trans-semiotizing strategies in the processes of academic reading, thinking, and writing across multiple timescales, and their trans-semiotizing had some positive influences on their development of the LR, particularly in the aspects of organizing structure, paragraph development, coherence and cohesion, and writer’s voice. On the other hand, the findings reveal that students’ monomodal ideologies may hinder their effective coordination of various linguistic and semiotic resources in academic communication. These findings offer crucial insights into the role of trans-semiotizing in expanding students’ communicative repertoires and fostering their academic literacy development. This paper stresses the importance of introducing and encouraging a trans-semiotizing stance when adopting multimodal approaches in academic contexts.