I am very pleased to introduce this special issue of Linguistics and Education, which is devoted to studies of how language combines with other semiotic resources.
The study of language in education is now a mature field. While there is undoubtedly still a great deal more to be learned about the linguistic characteristics of speech and writing in classrooms, schools, museums, and other educational settings ร and unlimited opportunity to use the tools of language analysis to explore every aspect of education ร most researchers who work on classroom language, and many who work with student writing, textbooks, and documentary sources, are acutely aware that language rarely, if ever, functions in isolation. Those of us who are interested in the role of language as a tool for making meaning know that the meanings language helps us make are also made through its combination with a variety of other semiotic resources. Spoken language is accompanied by gesture, facial expression, body movement and posture, as well as the visible contexts of setting and activity. Written language is frequently accompanied by pictorial and graphical images, as well as itself being expressed through the meaningful visual resources of orthography and typography. The study of language in education is essentially incomplete without some analysis of how language combines with other semiotic systems.
The first study in this special issue is borrowed from another project. In 1997 I was invited, along with a distinguished list of scholars in the field of language and literacy studies in education, to contribute to a multi-perspective analysis of the literacy demands of the secondary school curriculum. As I worked with a set of videotapes made in science and mathematics classrooms in Australia, it was striking how pervasively ร and in what complex ways ร the student whom these tapes followed through his school day needed to integrate spoken and written language with graphs, charts, arrows, diagrams, mathematical and chemical formulae, and calculator displays in order to make sense of much of what the teacher and curriculum demanded of him.