I sat in the swimming pool viewing area observing my child’s swimming lesson progress, in the far corner of the pool; he is now on blue caps and in the deep end. Nearer to me in my peripheral vision a swim teacher was leading a class of slightly younger children, in the shallower end of the pool. Swim teachers are not allowed in the water with the children, so they have to give instructions as clearly as possible to the children from the poolside. This is a hard task considering the instruction is for something so physical and therefore it seems counterintuitive to explain in words. Most instructors start with some verbal instruction, but knowing their audience, swiftly diminish the verbal in favour of using bodily movement, position, gesture and gaze to communicate the swim action to the children.
This particular teacher was explaining to the children how to push off the wall onto their backs. During the lesson he also used some words in Spanish (vamos, entiendes) usually marking the end (of an instruction, of the lesson) which the children seemed used to and understood even though presumably most or possibly none at this age spoke Spanish. In doing this, he sat on the poolside floor, and abruptly halting the verbal explanation, straightened, then lay on his back, propelling himself backwards about a meter, his body sliding on the chlorine water-soaked floor. This brought on a lot of excitement in the swimmers’ group who firstly did not expect the teacher to lay on the wet floor and secondly it seems could not wait to try this themselves. All children in turn promptly torpedoed themselves onto their backs in the water and swam with energy to the other end.
This I thought was a good example of what Pennycook terms semiotic assemblage (2017) – bringing together a range of linguistic and semiotic resources to meaningfully communicate with others. This teacher skilfully combined speech with body position and movement to communicate a complex action to the children. In semiotic assemblage, multiple modes are interwoven together and speech loses its hegemony in the communicative act. This illuminates the importance of noticing the interweaving and not over-prioritising the linguistic. Using bodily movement alongside and above speech was essential to inspire the movement and enthusiasm for that movement in the children. Translanguaging is also notable in the teacher’s communication – using words in Spanish strategically, as a marker of the end of his part in the interaction and the beginning of the children’s. In Pennycook’s writing translanguaging and multiple semiotic modes become part of the semiotic assemblage, questioning the boundedness of languages as well as this of semiotic modes.
Pennycook, A. (2017) Translanguaging and semiotic assemblages. International Journal of Multilingualism. 14:3, 269-282. DOI: 10.1080/14790718.2017.1315810