Full Description
This book offers a multimodal social semiotic perspective on the ways in which websites as hypermedia texts mediate and construct knowledge in mass media and education contexts. Specifically, the book proposes new tools for analysing how websites construe meanings through the interation of visual, verbal, kinetic and aural resources (i.e. multimodally and multimedially) and hyperlinks (i.e. hypertextually). To introduce the tools and demonstrate their value for research in applied linguistics, discourse analysis, media/communication studies, and education, the book presents analyses of websites for children, online news websites, and of users' navigation paths through some of these hypermedia texts. The selected Web texts epitomise the three key challenges that hypermedia texts on the Web present for discourse analysis: the interaction of multimodality and hypertextuality, the fluidity of hypermedia texts, and their generic hybridity.
Contents
I. Coming to the Web 1. The Web, Mass Media, and Eduction 2. Approaches to Understanding the Web II. On the Web: Analysing Websites and Their Use 3. Websites as Hierarchies of Meaning 4. A Grammar of Webpage Design 5. Website Cohesion and Navigation Paths 6. Website Design, Website Use, and Their Interaction III. Emerging with the Web 7. Online News and Children's Edutatinment Websites as Pedagogic Discourses 8. Future Directions
