Semiotic resources of teachers of mathematics: Complementary functions of discourse and gestures for scientific literacy at schools

Abstract

Teachers of mathematics unfold their pedagogical discourse through a range of semiotic resources, under the conditions of prototypical classroom dynamics that is face to face interaction and the use of the whiteboard. From a multimodal perspective, this research seeks to describe the main functions of the semiotic resources used by teachers for the regulation of disciplinary knowledge. A multiple case study was developed based on the performance of two teachers of freshmen and their lessons of mathematics. The results show that the main semiotic resources are speech and deictic gestures, which unfold in meaning configurations with specific purposes. Speech and gestures together, or in an inter-semiotical way build the mathematical knowledge and make up for a specialized combination typical to the pedagogy of scientific literacy.