Multimodal Evaluative Positioning in Academic Posters of Biology Students: Considerations for Science Literacy

Abstract

This paper explores multimodal value discursive positions, which integrates verbal mode and image in ensembles, in a corpus conformed by 8 academic posters of the course Cell Biology of a Chilean state university, made by first-year university students between 2016 and 2019. From each cohort, the two posters that obtained the highest score were selected. The objective is to identify, through the conceptual framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Social Semiotics, how interpersonal multimodal meanings are encoded in the corpus. The analysis provided evidence for the characterization of this academic genre from the perspective of the text’s verbal evaluative positions that are assembled with the visual resources to configure the semantic space. The results of the study show judgments evoked to elided agents that account for valuation, as a discursive strategy of students in the face of controversial topics in sciences, such as the use of stem cells and animal experimentation. The findings also show the need to include a multimodal approach in pedagogy processes considering the literacy of sciences in academic posters, since verbal meanings are assembled with visual meanings to mark evaluative positions. Finally, suggestions are proposed for the students to acquire appropriate evaluative strategies to approach scientific academic discourse.