- Title
- An analysis of intrasemiotic and intersemiotic relations of textual and visual modes in Namibian school science textbooks
- Creator
- Mateus, Venasius
- ThesisAdvisor
- Jawahar, Kavish
- Subject
- Science -- Study and teaching (Secondary) -- Namibia
- Subject
- Semiotics
- Subject
- Force and energy
- Subject
- Visual learning
- Subject
- Verbal learning
- Subject
- Functionalism (Linguistics)
- Subject
- Science -- Textbooks
- Date
- 2021-04
- Type
- thesis
- Type
- text
- Type
- Masters
- Type
- MEd
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/177203
- Identifier
- vital:42799
- Description
- Although science education in Namibia receives much attention, learners’ performance is low in subjects such as Physical Sciences. The topic of Forces is among the topics in Physical Sciences where learners perform poorly. The provision of basic education in Namibia faces many challenges. One of these is that many teachers are not fully qualified for teaching the subjects they currently teach. Another (possibly related) challenge is that the majority of teachers in Namibian schools rely heavily on school textbooks when planning their lessons. In addition, learners use school textbooks as learning aids. The textbooks are developed and published in the private sector and based on the national curriculum statements. Quality of education has been amongst the major goals of education in Namibia. For quality assurance purposes, school science textbooks have to undergo a formal evaluation process. School textbooks, especially science textbooks, are multimodal. This means that they are designed with various modes, such as the textual and visual, often used in expressing scientific meanings. Literature reveals the textual and visual as individual modes having their own affordances, however, when integrated in school science textbooks contribute to strengthened meanings. No study published was found in Namibia or elsewhere that focused on analysing the intrasemiotic and intersemiotic sense relations of the textual and visual modes in Namibian school Physical Sciences textbooks. This study therefore aimed at contributing to filling this knowledge gap. The research is a qualitative case study and employed the interpretive paradigm. The selected Physical Sciences textbooks that constitute the data in this study were explored in depth via document analysis. Related textual and visual modes in the Physical Sciences textbooks were analysed in order to help answer the research questions of the study. Systemic Functional Linguistics was employed as the theoretical underpinning for this study. In this study, the sense relations were explored in terms of the sense relation themes which were coded and developed from common features of scientific discourse. The results reveal that scientific knowledge within the textual mode in the topic of Forces is communicated mostly through synonymy and repetition while within the visual mode it is mostly through antonymy, collocation, and synonymy. This contributed to meaning potential in the topic of Forces for the three Physical Sciences textbooks. The results further indicated that the overall cohesion within the textual and visual modes in the topic of Forces is achieved since repetition, which is the most direct form of lexical cohesion together with synonymy, collocation, and antonymy which are aspects of cohesion, occurred most frequently within these modes. This result further indicates that meaning potential in the topic of Forces in the three Physical Sciences textbooks were strengthened. While some sense relations occurred most frequently within individual modes, they were less frequent in other modes and vice versa. This indicates that different modes have different affordances. Finally, it was found that combining the textual and visual modes in the topic of Forces contributes to intersemiotic complementarity being achieved through the sense relations of collocation, hyponymy, and meronymy.
- Description
- Thesis (MEd) -- Education, Education, 2021
- Format
- computer, online resource, application/pdf, 1 online resource (261 pages), pdf
- Publisher
- Rhodes University, Faculty of Education, Education
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Mateus, Venasius
- Rights
- All Rights Reserved
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | SOURCE1 | MATEUS-MED-TR21-68.pdf | 2 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |