Viewpoints in multimodal storytelling: From sensation to narration

This study combines the virtual world of Second Life with a classroom storytelling activity to explore the ways in which second language (L2) speakers express narrative viewpoints. Building upon social-semiotic approaches to multimodality, the researcher analyzed 27 transcribed narrative presentations by nine English majors at a university in Taiwan. The L2 students expressed narrative viewpoints through a range of cohesive and evaluative resources. Multimodal analysis revealed a more dynamic organization of visual and embodied actions to enhance speaker stances. Visual compositions and camera techniques could be considered as having textual metafunctions for visual-verbal cohesion. This study may provide insight into multimodal communication and rhetoric aimed at the construction of viewpoint for facilitating the semiotic process from sensation to narration.