Language, education, and society

Research projects:

New communication technologies and the formation of learning communities

Description: This project analyses ways in which new communication technologies facilitate and constrain the formation of learning communities within formal and informal educational settings.

Professor in charge: Leland Emerson McCleary (mccleary@usp.br)

 

Verbal/nonverbal interfaces in multimodal discourse

Description: The aim of this research is to investigate the ways in which prototypically linguistic elements of language-in-use interact with non-linguistic elements (material, tactile, visual, gestural) in multimodal discourse by applying concepts of cognitive and interactive semiotics.

Professor in charge: Leland Emerson McCleary (mccleary@usp.br)

 

Foreign language and identity: meanings, images, and memory about the English language in Brazil

Description: Study on discursiveness around English language in Brazil, focusing on the analysis of political-educational, academic-pedagogical, and media discourses. Research on the effects of meaning produced in these discourses, their relationship with the discursive and social memory, and the construction of identity positions for the Brazilian individual.

Professor in charge: Marisa Grigoletto (grigol@usp.br)

 

New literacies, multiliteracies, and the teaching of foreign languages

Description: New literacies and multiliteracies turn to the teaching of cultural ways of seeing, describing, explaining, understanding textual representations, values, ideologies, discourses, positioning, having world view, and understanding the relationships between knowledge and power in society. This study focuses on language, integrating image, mother tongue, and foreign languages.

Professor in charge: Walkyria Maria Monte Mór (wmm@usp.br)

 

Media discourse and constitution of identities

Description: Study on media discourse, investigating the discursive operation of several types of text and the constitution of the identities of the subjects involved.

Professor in charge: Anna Maria Grammatico Carmagnani (amcarmag@usp.br)

 

Passions and images of the “I” and the “other” in adolescent discourse

Description: From the perspective of discursive semiotics, texts of different genres are studied to investigate the discursive mechanisms which demonstrate how adolescents place themselves in the context of their sociocultural universe. These discursive subjects, whether individual or collective, express their values and passions in the process of constructing and circulating images of themselves and others.

Professor in charge: Elizabeth Harkot-de-La-Taille (beth.harkot@usp.br)

 

Brazil/Canada Project: exchange of knowledge

Description: Studies on multiliteracies, culture, and globalisation in Brazil and in Canada through research carried out by members of the National Project of Teacher Education.

Professor in charge: Walkyria Maria Monte Mór (wmm@usp.br)

 

National project of teacher education: new literacies, multiliteracies, and languages

Description: Study on current conditions of teaching of languages in Brazil and proposals for renewing them through research conducted by members of regional universities that participate in the project.

Professor in charge: Walkyria Maria Monte Mór (wmm@usp.br)

 

Semantic and discursive questions in foreign language

Description: This project seeks to investigate, based on discursive, deconstructivist, and psychoanalytic studies, how models of several discourses work.

Professor in charge: Deusa Maria de Souza-Pinheiro Passos (deusa@usp.br)

 

Meaning, delimitation of values, and identity construction

Description: Cultural texts of different genres are studied from the perspective of discursive semiotics. This entails focusing on the relationship between the process of signification and the delimitation of social values, as well as tensions between such relationships, and the individual or collective identity construction in a given sociocultural universe.

Professor in charge: Elizabeth Harkot-de-La-Taille (beth.harkot@usp.br)