This highly readable book develops a numanistic, and specifically semiotic approach to multiculturalism. It reveals how semiotics provides fresh and valuable insights into multiculturalism: in contrast to the binary logic of dualistic philosophy, semiotic logic does not understand the value of truth in rigid terms of ‘true’ or ‘false’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ only. The value of truth resides in meaning, which is a dynamic, evolutionary phenomenon, rooted, nevertheless, in factuality. Drawing on recent developments in biosemiotics, the book presents a theoretical approach to multiculturalism, regarding the lives of people living in multicultural environments. Rather than analyzing political or economic phenomena, it offers a semiotic analysis of multiculturalism and discusses its educational implications. It also invites readers to regard learning as a phenomenon of ecological sign growth and to understand multiculturalism along the same lines. As such, it brings together the life and social sciences and the humanities in a unified perspective, in an approach fitting postmodernism. Developing a postmodern philosophy for contemporary non-experts, which allows distancing from political discourse in favor of a posthumanistic stand, where altruism is seen as an opportunity, not a threat, this book appeals to a wide readership, from scholars seeking state-of-the-art theories to general readers looking for a thought-provoking and enlightening read.

"This collection brings together a range of perspectives on intercultural communication in multimodal interaction, bridging cognitive, social and functional approaches toward promoting cross-disciplinary dialogues and taking research at the intersections of these fields into new directions. The volume brings together conversationalist, socially-oriented, cognitive, and sensory approaches in considering culture as a dynamic construct, co-constituted and (re)negotiated between participants in interaction, and filtering it through a multimodal lens, drawing on a range of examples, such as educational settings or online video platforms. Each chapter offers a unique perspective on 'culture' and 'intercultural' while also situating their own definitions of these labels against those of the other chapters. Taken together, the chapters form a fluid conversation on the nature of intercultural encounters in today's globalized world, as digital environments intertwine with the physical mobility of people, encouraging researchers across these fields to adopt a more holistic multimodal perspective to approach intercultural interaction. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in intercultural communication, multimodality, sociolinguistics, cognitive and interactional linguistics, and semiotics"--

A first in multimodal/multisemiotic discourse studies this collection of original articles by international scholars focuses primarily on texts from non-English speaking contexts. The illuminating insights enhance our understanding of how language and other semiotic resources construe specific cultural and social concerns.

Text Sets: Multimodal Learning for Multicultural Students integrates a multicultural approach to teaching with standards-based instruction and multimodal learning opportunities in a variety of content areas. This unique combination allows teachers to meet the demands of their curriculum while recognizing and honoring the diverse students in their classroom. Each chapter provides an annotated text set with a specific theme, curricular goals, and instructional activities that suggest ways for students to interact with the texts. In addition to providing ready-made text sets, it models a framework for teachers to build their own text sets based on the individual needs of their schools and communities.

This volume develops a new multimodal semiotic approach to the study of communication, examining how multimodal discourse is construed transmedially and interculturally and how new technologies and cultural stances inform communicative contexts across the world. It contributes to current theoretical debates in the disciplines of semiotics, linguistics, multimodality, and pragmatics, as well as those aspects of pedagogy and film studies that engage with the notions of text and narrative by addressing questions such as: How do we study multimedia communication? How do we incorporate the impact of new media technologies into the study of Linguistics and Semiotics? How do we construe culture in modern communication? How useful are the current multidisciplinary approaches to multimodal communication? Through the analysis of specific case studies that are developed within diverse academic disciplines and which draw on a range of theoretical frameworks, the goal of this book is to provide a basis for an overarching framework that can be applied by scholars and students with different academic and cultural backgrounds.

The way speakers in multilingual contexts develop own varieties in their interactions sheds light on code switching and multimodal dynamic co-constructions of grammar in use. This volume explores the intersection of multimodality and language use of multilingual speakers. Firstly, theoretical frames are discussed and empirical studies involving Catalan, German and Spanish as L1, L2 or FL are presented interconnecting verbal and gestural modalities into grammar description or exploring actions as sources for gestures, which may nonverbally represent the argument in German dynamic motion verbs. Other chapters focus on positionings in interviews, lexical access searches or proxemics in greetings and farewells. The contributions secondly focus on verbal features of language use in multilingual contexts related to self-representation and co-construction of identity through code-switching, deixis or argumentative reasoning in different communicative events based on multilingual data of languages including Croatian, English, Italian, Brazilian-Portuguese and Polish. The findings call for a reviewed conception of grammar description with implications also for the conceptualization of deixis, for L2/foreign language acquisition and language teaching policies.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: very good, University of Salzburg (Anglistics-American Studies), language: English, abstract: Although I have never been a regular viewer of ‘Star Trek’ and thus would not con¬sider myself a “Trekkie”, I have chosen this quotation as a starting point as it very well ex¬presses the problem I will deal with in the following paper: being different in terms of culture, language, education, or social status. I have also chosen the above quotation because of its second line as it suggests a produc¬tive way of dealing with the difficulty of being different. Be it in a thousand years or in the present time, we have to find solutions to the problems that arise when people coming from totally different cultural or social backgrounds meet and have to live together. In the course of my studies at the University of Salzburg, I have come across a broad variety of topics related to the field of Linguistics. Among others, I dealt with the linguistic terminology at the beginning of our studies, some varieties of English, their main features, with Psycholinguistics, or with language acquisition but to name a few. However, one main topic of Linguistics that has always had a special attraction to me was the field of Sociolin-guistics. It has been interesting to hear how speakers’ cultural or social background, age, gen-der, or education, have an influence on their register. Furthermore, it is also important that language always represents a certain status or the membership to a certain ethnic group and/or minority. Normally, people who speak a certain dialect are proud of that and it means more to them than just speaking it. It represents heritage, tradition, and sometimes nationalism for them. They simply want to be different in order to dissociate themselves from other ethnic groups with different dialects.