Annotation in School English: A Social Semiotic Historical Account

Abstract

What exactly has changed in the production of secondary school English over the last decade? To provide one part of an answer to that question, this paper takes the practice of annotation—a defining activity of the sub-ject English in the UK seldom researched—and uses it as a device for uncovering aspects of changes in the subject. The theoretical approach is that of multimodal social semiotics with an historical perspective. A mul-timodal approach looks beyond language to all forms of communication (Jewitt, 2009; Kress, 2009). The approach used in this paper allows inves-tigation of the interactions among changes in the social environment, policy, curriculum, technology, and student resources. We draw on illus-trative examples from three research projects around subject English: the Gains and Losses Project—consisting of 100 textbooks, largely from 1935 to the present day (Bezemer & Kress, 2009); case studies collected in 2000 for the Production of School English Project (Kress, Jewitt, Bourne, Franks, Hardcastle et al., 2005); and the Evaluation of Schools Whiteboard Expansion Project (Moss et al., 2007). Our analysis shows that by 2009, the policy, technological, and commu-nicational landscape of school English had changed dramatically. Now the majority of English lessons are taught on an Internet-enabled inter-active whiteboard (IWB) supported by scanners, visualizers, and wireless peripherals such as slates (Moss et al., 2007). In this reconfigured land-scape, the use of images and video is increasingly part of curriculum 130 National Society for the Study of Education resources and of teachers' pedagogic practice in school English, as well as the communicational repertoire of students at school and at home. Where previously teachers relied mainly on language, they now provide visual starting points for their lessons and offer visual routes into curricu-lum concepts, annotating a text by using images, for instance, to define or anchor meaning. Added to this, the use of images in English textbooks and digital learning resources has increased exponentially over the past decade, accompanied by significant changes in the use of writing, layout, typography, and color. Writing continues to have a significant role in the English classroom, but the emphasis and characteristics of writing on-screen appear to be changing its pedagogic and curricular function and, with that, its form. SCHOOL ENGLISH THROUGH A MULTIMODAL LENS