Semiosis as a Multimodal Process

Classical semiotic approaches are too narrow to investigate the didactical phenomena in the mathematics classroom. In addiction to the standard semiotic resources used by students and teacher (e.g. written symbols and speach), other important semiotic ressources include algo gestures, glances, drawing and extra-linguistic modes of expressions. However, these semiotic ressources fit with difficulties within the constaints of the classical definitions of semiotic systems. To overcome such difficulties I adopt a vygotskian approch and present an enlarged notion of semiotic system, the semiotic bundle, which reveals particularly useful for framing all the semiotic resources we find in the learning processes in mathematics. The papper stresses some critical points in the paradigm, which is emerging in these last years from researches in psychomlinguistics and neuroscience and analyses gestures from a semiotic point of view. Then it introduces the notio of semiotic bundle and exemplifies it though a case study.