Digitalized story making in the classroom : a social semiotic perspective on gender, multimodality and learning

摘要

The article takes the case of pupils in a fifth-year primary school class (10-11years old) who use text and pictures in their creative writing on theclassroom computers. The study confirms what the research literatureindicates, that girls show more interest than boys in writing and storytelling,while boys show greater interest than girls in using computertechnology. Social semiotics is used as a theoretical basis for analysing theconnection between these differences and relating them to what girls andboys learn. In a social semiotic perspective, learning can be related to theexperience of the difference between what we intend to express and what weactually manage to express or mean. In the article, it is argued that socialsemiotics provides a theoretical basis for asserting that the girls in this caselearn more than the boys because they associate themselves with the signsthey use through more choices than the boys. The girls, we could say, puttheir own mark on the signs by coding or creating them themselves while theboys tend more to choose ready-made signs. Ready-made signs require fewerchoices than the signs we make or code ourselves. Fewer choices means lessexperience of the difference between what we wish to mean and what weactually mean, and hence less learning. A pedagogical consequence of this isthat boys may be better served by having online work with multimodality ofexpression organised in such a way that it combines as far as possible the useof ready-made signs with signs they code or create themselves.