LOGICAL MEANINGS IN MULTIMEDIA LEARNING MATERIALS: A MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Multimedia educational applications convey meanings through several semiotic modes (e.g. text, image, sound, etc.). There is an urgent need for multimedia designers as well as for teachers to understand the meaning potential of these artifacts and discern the communicative purposes they serve. Towards this direction, a hermeneutic semiotic framework is proposed, which provides a controlled vocabulary for describing the logical meanings among the components that constitute multimedia representations. The framework in turn is implemented in the analysis of some multimedia materials in order to detect the types of their components and the logico-semantic relations identified among them. Using that framework, teachers would be equipped with visual literacy skills for reading the logical meanings of multimedia learning materials and multimedia designers would be able to design their own applications with respect to the logical meanings they want to promote through them.