Abstracts - Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

meaning making. The guiding question was: How did the teacher’s intertextualapproach encourage or inhibit her language minority students to borrow an array ofsemiotic resources to construe meaning in their multimodal texts? Data sources forthe study included videotaped classroom activities, students’ drafts of literarynarratives and other written texts, interviews with participants, and curriculummaterials. The study used an SFL multimodal and ethnographic case study approachto analyze how a focal Puerto Rican student construed the field and tenor in herliterary compositions through complex patterns of multimodal relations (e.g.,representation, composition and modality), which were appropriated from sourceliterature. Similar to Fairclough’s (1992) division of intertextuality into ‘manifest’and ‘constitutive’ intertextuality, findings show that the appropriation ranged frommimetic use of genre sequences to parodic and playful incorporation of multimodalresources of source texts.6. Multilingual students and the recontextualization of quotidian knowledgeKnowledge is not so much presented as re-presented, and an individual’s construalof a context’s potential, their understanding of what and how knowledge might beshared, is directly connected to their understanding of the system potential oflanguage (Hasan, 2009). Drawing on the analytical resources of systemic functionallinguistics (SFL), this paper examines how recontextualization of students’ quotidianknowledge, particularly their multilingual capabilities, sensitizes learners to howlanguage is used to produce and reproduce knowledge across contexts (Bernstein,2000; Halliday, 2004). While research in language and literacy education frequentlyargues for inclusion of multiethnic students’ out-of-school literacies practices(Bearne, 2003; Cazden, 2000), analysis of paper and digital texts from a CanadianSSRHC-funded study suggests such practices produce far more complextransformations of meaning than captured in these discussions. A detailed analysisof a Grade 7 Cantonese speaker’s Language Arts project, her public digital representationof the project, and her project reflections evidence the cognitivedemands of multilingual text production. Further, the English and Cantoneseinteractions around the text and the embedded non-digital elements demonstratean awareness of representational choices that is not adequately captured by simpledescriptions of code switching. Bernstein’s pedagogic device serves as a conceptuallens for examining text/context relations and the lexicogrammatical optionsavailable to language learners.ReferencesBearne, E. (2003). Rethinking literacy: Communication, representation and text [Electronicversion]. Literacy 37(3), 98-103.Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique.ISFC38 Book of Abstracts Page 225 Lisbon, July 2011