Géneros en la enseñanza escolar: Configuraciones de significado en clases de historia y biología desde una perspectiva multimodal

Genre as a configuration of meaning with a social purpose (Martin & Rose, 2008a) in the context of secondary school meets both the needs of teaching and the specificities of the discipline resemiotized and recontextualized by teachers in their lessons. In this sense, both history and biology teachers unfold meaning configurations constructed upon semiotic combinations according to teaching purposes as well as social and material conditions of the classroom context. This study describes, from a multimodal perspective, the main genres for teaching identified in biology and history in the first year of secondary school. The corpus consists of audio-visual recordings of the lessons of three teachers of each course in first year of secondary school in Valparaíso Region, Chile. The findings show that historical accounts and factorial explanations are unfold in History lessons through prototypical semiotic combinations. While in Biology lessons, definitions -descriptions, classifications, compositions-and sequential explanations are built by teachers on a multimodal orchestration. Through these genres and their semiotic combinations, teachers get their students closer to the ways of thinking and communicating specific to each discipline.