Multimodal literacy in academic environments: PowerPoint as a motivational genre

This paper explores PowerPoint (PPT) as a leading genre in academic discourse, focussing on the implementation of student motivation boosting strategies. ICT nowadays plays an increasingly important role in pedagogy, by reinforcing the informative and persuasive impact of instructional materials through multimodal strategies including verbal and visual codes, as well as performative elements. A hybrid genre in academic oratory, PPT offers corporeality of knowledge, modularity and easily transmittable format, providing presentations with structure and facilitating ordering and summarizing operations. PPT can therefore be ranked among today’s epistemic machineries, whereby knowledge is construed by discourse. The paper analyses the semiotic and metadiscursive features of a corpus of presentations produced in various universities for both academic staff and students. Research questions explore how PPT can be used to motivate teachers and students, from both an ideational and interactional standpoint. An integrated analytical approach is employed, bridging multimodal and critical discourse analysis.


I. INTRODUCTION
This paper addresses the ways in which Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and particularly PowerPoint (PPT), is affecting the semiotic and linguistic features of academic communication, both in symmetric and asymmetric settings, with a specific focus on the dissemination and implementation of student motivation boosting strategies. Motivation is a major factor in today's pedagogy: as the Latin root of the word suggests, to motivate students means 'to move' them, i.e., to incentive or drive them to act in order to achieve specific results or goals (Williams and Williams 2011: 2). As socio-cognitive psychology indicates, motivation and cognition work in concert, in that individuals have the ability to discern how to regulate their behaviour so that it meets their learning goals (Eccles and Wigfield 2002: 123). Research on the psychopedagogy of foreign languages and the pedagogical influence of ICT (Dörnyei 2001;Dörnyei and Schmidt 2001) has shown in particular that students should be encouraged to play an active role in the educational process (Bellés-Fortuño and Ollero 2015: 146), 3 (i) on the ideational leveldealing with the ways in which a visual and textual construct can signify the 'real' world inside its semiotic boundaries, and thus convey extra-linguistic experience (Halliday 2004: 29) the representation of informative meanings in PPTs will be examined. A typology of the semiotic modes employed in the corpus will single out the referential strategies building a unified image of students' self-confidence and study skill optimisation. Such multimodal analysis will highlight the visually realised aspect of motivation showcase the interactional significance (and verbal realisation) of motivation discourse in the PPT corpus. The following research question will be addressed: how do different realisations of engagement within the instructional community contribute to define the rationale for PPT as a prominent genre in academic communication?
The interaction between the ideational and interactional features of PPT as an academic genre will lastly be explored, following a social semiotic approach to multimodal analysis (Kress andVan Leeuwen 1996, 2001), in order to examine the extent to (and the ways in) which each level contributes in the resemiotization process construing PPT as an example of synoptic/multi-semiotic textuality (Charles and Ventola 2002: 172).

II. MATERIALS
For the purpose of this analysis, a corpus of 32 PPT presentations, recently produced by different universities in 22 countries (including Europe, Africa, China, India, Russia and the USA), has been assembled. The Google search engine (KW: "academic motivation .ppt") has been used in order to retrieve the documents. Given PPT's diffusion as the "most ubiquitous form of digitally assisted demonstration", aimed at a manifold "sociotechnical assemblage" of audiences (Stark and Paravel 2008: 3), and assuming academic motivation to be a complex psycho-social phenomenon (Eccles and Wigfield 2002), an equal number of slideshows targeted to lecturers and to students have been sampled.
The former instruct academic staff on how to inspire intentional learners, stimulate commitment to attend class and perform well in exams, while the latter train students to set goals, enhance competence and self-efficacy perception, develop study skills and autonomous behaviour, etc. Two subcorpora have thus been obtained, contrasting symmetric (subcorpus 1) vs. asymmetric (subcorpus 2) communication contexts, totalling 1,213 slides and 56,288 words, as can be seen in Table 1.  It should be noted that (a) and (b) are monosemic modes, in that, by referring to empirical quantities in extra-linguistic reality, the meaning of every sign is defined beforehand, and known prior to (and regardless of) any "observation of the collection of signs" (Bertin 2011:2). While both mathematics and graphics display high adherence to empirical phenomena, i.e., they generally tend to be perceived as unambiguous, objective, neutral and non-culture driven, they differ as to their perceptual structure, for graphics visually provides instantaneous perception to quantitative phenomena which would otherwise require longer processing. In the light of this, it is possible to explain Although the difference between written language and figurative imagery largely amounts to their appeal to different sensory stimuli (hearing and sight), and to the different referential and social interactions strategies they employ, both are perceived as being on the opposite side of the referential spectrum from mathematics and graphics, as they tend to be considered subjective, biased and culture driven. Although social semiotics has fully clarified that visual language works on a lexicogrammar of its own, realizing meanings as linguistic structures do (Kress 2003(Kress , 2010Kress andVan Leeuwen 1996, 2001;Van Leeuwen 2004, 2005, and that no human (re)presentation of extra-linguistic reality is ever without cognitive effects, such perception may have an explanation. As a matter of fact, while numerical and graphical visuals tend to naturalize the distance between their semiotic boundaries and the reality theyas signs stand for, the scriptural and figurative modes tend to emphasize such hiatus, and to display their "rich cultural load" (Rowley-Jolivet 2000: 4), since in the case of polysemic codes, the "reading operation takes place between the sign and its meaning", whereby ambiguity and subjectivity are brought in the process (Bertin 2011: 2).
Reading pictures, as well as reading words, actually involves not only construing meanings from what we see/read, but also from what we know (Kostelnick 1993: 244), which makes both operations overtly cognitive in nature. Figure 1 offers a schematization of the semiotic modes along the (perceived) referential continuum. The proportions, functions and variation patterns among the five types of engagement markers and between the subcorpora will be discussed, in order to evidence the ways in which two different segments of a discourse community are targeted by specific interactional resources and pragmatic strategies.

Stefania Consonni
Language Value 10 (1), 1-28 http://www.e-revistes.uji.es/languagevalue 8 IV. RESULTS Table 2 provides a breakdown of the semiotic types of slides (numerical, graphical, scriptural and figurative) to be found in each PPT presentation, and in each subcorpus. The typology has been organized following the referential continuum in Figure 1. Beside the disparity in the total (744 vs. 469), and in the average number of slides (46,5 vs.

IV.1. Ideational level
29,3) in the subcorporawhich could be explained in terms of the different attention span and literacy standards to be expected from an expert vs. student audiencethe table evidences some remarkable variations among the semiotic modes.
Numerical slides, presenting empirical reality via quantitative tables and formulae, seldom occur in both subcorpora (1,8% in subcorpus 1 and 0,7% in subcorpus 2). Their typical function is to provide figures as empirical, or scientific, evidence to what is being discussed in the presentation, as is shown for instance in Figure    Opposite trends are instead shown by the two most frequent semiotic modes in both subcorpora, namely, the polysemic ones: linguistic slides amount to 80,1% of subcorpus This seems to suggest that in staff-to-staff presentations, when it comes to the preferred strategy for structuring ideational contents, especially when typological meanings are involved, words are expected to be more effective than pictures: that is, when targeting the logical and argumentative competence of academic staff, the verbal and linguistic construction of information prevails, as can for instance be inferred from Figure 4 (Wood 2017, from subcorpus 1), explaining a researcher's key findings in psychocognitive pedagogy.  Conversely, in asymmetric contexts, the multi-literacy stimuli offered by PPT can be said to be effective as concerns the transfer of contents from experts to learners: evidence from social and behavioural sciences (Kosslyn et al. 2012;Paoletti et al. 2012) shows that PPT's conflation of lexico-syntactical and visual structures tends to be preferred by students over traditional media (such as blackboards or transparencies), in that it facilitates and strengthens information processing operations, to such an extent that students tend to tag themselves as "visual learners" (Amare 2006: 302). By Interestingly, motivation seems to emerge from the investigated PPT corpus as a psychosocial outcome of multi-semiotic textuality.  (542,86 vs. 325,97). Although, as shown in Table 2, subcorpus 2 has approximately half as many scriptural slides as subcorpus 1 (283 vs. 596), the average frequency of markers in scriptural slides is over twice as high in subcorpus 2 (45,23) than in subcorpus 1 (20,37). Motivational discourse addressing students seems in fact more in need of specific linguistic resources in order to signal the inclusion of readers as discourse participants, emphasising on the one hand commonalityas is the case of the inclusive pronouns we, us, our, ourselvesand on the other the individuality of each reader/viewer, who needs to be constantly made aware (by means of reader pronouns such as you, your, yourself) of being the presentation's designed addressee and beneficiary. The preferred interactional features in both subcorpora are reader pronouns and imperatives, albeit in inverted proportions. While imperatives are the most widely used category in subcorpus 1 (123,38), followed by reader pronouns (89,66), reader pronouns rank first in subcorpus 2 (243,43), followed by imperatives (145,28). The proportions within each subcorpus can be further observed in Charts 3 and 4. Symmetric contexts show a you vs. we ratio of 3:1, while the imperative vs. you ratio is approximately 4:3 (see Chart 3); in asymmetric contexts, the you vs. we ratio increases to 7:1, while the imperative vs. you ratio declines to 3:5 (see Chart 4). This seems to indicate that community pronouns, emphasising common knowledge or experience, or advocating team spirit (Vassileva 2002: 270), are a favourite interactional resource when motivation discourse is meant for academic staff, whereas reader pronouns, stressing individual worth and thus boosting individual effort, are a typical resource when students are being addressed.

IV.2. Interpersonal level
Chart 3. Engagement markers in subcorpus 1 (normalized frequency per 10,000 words) Chart 4. Engagement markers in subcorpus 2 (normalized frequency per 10,000 words) The charts also reveal information about the third preferred resource for engagement in the PPT corpus, i.e., questions. While asymmetric contexts use way less than half as many questions as reader pronouns (102,58 vs. 243,43), in symmetric contexts the proportion significantly changes to approximately four interrogative structures every five reader pronouns (73,97 vs. 89,66). Questions are typical of PPT's conventionalized 18 cognitive style (Tufte 2003), and of PPT as an "open-for-discussion" tool (Webber 2002) for communicating state-of-the-art knowledge to an audience who is expected to react, either asking questions or producing comments. As can be seen in Figure 6 (Landis 2005, from subcorpus 1), the typical PPT slide follows an add-on, theme-rheme (or gap-filler) information sequence, eliciting the reader/viewer's curiosity via the heading, and providing answers in the body text (usually organized through bullet points). If slides in general are organized in gap-filler slots, in the case of subcorpus 1 this seems to match the possible informational request of an expert audience, who, being engaged by a possible gap in their knowledge system, will probably look forward to developing new educational protocols. In the case of a student audience, instead, PPT's argumentative structure tends to be perceived as facilitating the understanding and retention of instructional materials (Susskind 2005: 204). In both contexts, the use of interrogative structures can be said to function as an interactional booster of standard PPT gap-filler argumentative patterns. that PPT may positively influence students' task-focused and social supportive behaviour. Both effects can impact the building of a unified image of self-confidence, and the optimisation of students' study skills and general organisation. Motivation seems therefore to be an interestingly psycho-social and discursive phenomenon.
Results from metadiscourse analysis (and on the interpersonal level) have shown how motivational PPTs hinge on a typology of interactional markersnamely, reader and community pronouns, imperatives, and questionswhose function is to maximize engagement and commitment from the part of both teachers and learners. Engagement markers are the main linguistic manifestation of motivation discourse in the PPT corpus, and, as in the case of the abovementioned four semiotic modes, they also evidence functional variation patterns along different pragmatic purposes and communicative contexts. Interactional outcomes of motivation discourse can encompass a range of functions, from explanatory to normative to emotional ones, depending on the proportions among the various types of metadiscourse used in the subcorpora, and complementing the argumentative efficacy of PPT as a leading genre in academic contexts. The case of questions and imperatives seems in particular to highlight the high potential for dialogical communication, and for the eliciting of various degrees of commitment on the part of the reader, which is typical of PPT's standard logical structure, usually built on gap-filler (or theme-theme) information sequences. Reader 21 and community pronouns also seem a typical resource of PPT as a hybrid "inscribed genre" (Van Leeuwen 2004: 10), whereby repeated appeals to individual readers and the pedagogical communityalso crucial in the process of motivating both oneself and othersare accommodated by the multi-semiotic affordances of the genre.
In conclusion, this paper has aimed to suggest that the motivational impact of PPT in a constructivist academic environment can be found at both the ideational and the interpersonal level. It is distributed across four signification systems, stemming in different ways from the ideational expression of empirical experience offered by various types of visuals (such as, for instance, graphical devices and/or figurative imagery), as well as from the linguistic construction of dialogical roles between academic staff and students in the communication of experiential meanings (as is the case of metadiscourse markers). Multimodal literacy can therefore contribute, on the one hand, to the development of committed, autonomous and creative behaviour on the part of individual students, and, on the other, to the reinforcement of social processes of "communication and collaboration among students" as well as between students and teachers (Bellés-Calvera and Bellés-Fortuño 2018: 107). In the light of the above, potential implications of the present study may include extending the analysis to the third metafunction Systemic Functional Grammar metafunction (Halliday 2002(Halliday , 2004. Researching PPT as a fully trifunctional language may help further research focus on the ways -also including "performative" aspects of PPT, such as kinesic and paralinguistic features (Van Leeuwen 2004: 10)in which the trifunctional load is worked out among the different resources in the multi-semiotic mix.