Developing strategic readers: a multimodal analysis of a primary school teacher's use of speech, gesture and artefacts

Research on implementing reading strategy instruction has primarily focused on teachers' verbal communication with limited attention to other semiotic resources such as gesture and artefacts. In this paper, we construct a ‘telling case’ on the basis of how one primary teacher from the United States used speech, gesture and artefacts as a means of communication while instructing her students in reasons to predict when reading. Data sources for this case study consisted of field notes, artefacts and digital video. We analysed the teacher's use of gesture, speech and artefacts from a social semiotic multimodal perspective. Findings indicate that the teacher created meaning by interweaving multiple modes in the communicative contexts of strategy instruction using speech, deictic gestures, metaphoric gestures and artefacts. These findings are important to reading strategy instruction because much of the research and discussion of practice to date has centred on the instruction of reading strategies using teacher and student speech and not attending to the use of semiotic resources beyond speech.