The research group of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH)
The AUTH group is involved with three central research strands for the development of high school students' critical literacy:
Analysis of TV News Narratives: Their Applicability for the Purposes of Critical Literacy
This research project conducted by the AUTH group is mainly concerned with the linguistic analysis of narratives embedded in TV news texts as well as with the approach of the latter as instantiations of narrative discourse. The project is aiming to formulate a unified proposal for the instruction of narrative in secondary Greek-language classes, such that serves the purposes of critical language awareness, by designing new teaching material enriched with TV news texts.
Current trends in the approach of narrative discourse, both literal and conversational, tend to agree that narrative is -beyond its discursive or, indeed, any other kind of semiotic realization- a universal semiotic mode, inherent to human cognition, that provides thematic interpretive patterns for shaping and configuring reality in a meaningful way. In addition, narrative discourse is unanimously considered to be the field where speakers’ and hearers’ identities are inscribed and realized, including their positioning with respect to overarching, master and counter narratives, the field where individual and social conceptualizations of regularity and its disruption are circulated and negotiated.
Contrary to the above, the current teaching approach undertaken by Greek secondary language courses concerning narrative was found in a preliminary research conducted by our team (Kefalidou & Politis, 2013) to ignore the centrality of narrative to both thinking and the construction of identities, failing to treat its instruction as a vehicle to the enhancement of students’ critical linguistic awareness. For one thing, it treats narrative as a mode of discourse rather than a way of thinking. Furthermore, it focuses the analysis of its special properties in mainly linguistic texts the majority of which are furthermore taken from the field of literature.
Following Koutsogiannis (2012), we analyze such deficiencies as stemming from both the specific metalanguage adopted by the textbooks and the selection of specific texts that are supposed to instantiate narrative. Our team, therefore, proposes an alternative teaching approach to narrative, one that combines a cognitive-semiotic analysis with discourse-analytical tools and practices. The advantages of the revision of the textbooks’ metalanguage along these lines include the uniform approach of texts as narratives irrespectively of their semiotic encoding and the foregrounding of subjectivity and ideology as dimensions incorporated in our narrative grasp and presentation of reality and, therefore, as forces that structure our narrative discourse.
In complete alignment with our view of narrative lies our analysis of TV news narratives and the research’s proposal to include the latter in the sample texts exemplifying narrative for teaching purposes. Being multimodal, they allow students to critically think about the various aspects of narrative meaning undertaken by either the visual or the linguistic code. Furthermore, once their contribution to the social construction of “truthful discourse” is beyond dispute, their study serves a very central aim of critical school literacy, the enhancement of the students’ ability to read texts as discursive “battlefields”, as the products of socially situated agents who are not granted the same degree of social power and are bound by the restrictions (and favored by the advantages) of their social status.
Indicatively, the study of TV news narratives then focuses inter alia on the following subjects:
The digital literacy practices of teenagers: The case of Facebook and its implications for critical literacy
This research project currently being carried out by theAUTH group aims to understand and produce an ethnographical account of the digital literacy practices observed in teenagers in the last two classes of Greek secondary schools. Due to the prominent role new technology plays in the lives of teenagers in modern society, the various types of interaction teenagers engage in with digital resources are expected to define to a major extent their literacy development.
Thus, our research involves the study of various forms of language used by teenagers when interacting with each other in digital spaces and focuses on three particular areas:
In the case of the use of the Latin instead of the Greek alphabet in computer mediated discourse, researchers have tried to interpret the reasons for its continued use despite the original technological limitations being solved (Androutsopoulos 2009). Current theories seem to attribute the continued use, especially by teenagers, to an affiliation with modern and global trends, for which the Latin script and English in general have a special identity value (Koutsogiannis 2012). Our research aims to link the usage of the Latin script in Greek digital communication to various social variables such as social and educational background, as well as to gain insight into the teenagers’ own stances and interpretations of the reasons they use the Latin script.
Finally, regarding the role of English, recent studies show that the traditional approach to interpreting English loanwords in Greek i.e. borrowing is no longer sufficient in light of the new trends of incorporating entire phrase and sentence structures from English into Greek which have not been assimilated into the Greek language but result from the users’ exposure to alternative linguistic resources from the media, the Internet etc. As a result, current research is moving away from the traditional approach to assess the tendency that people have in late modern societies to make use of features from various languages, even if the entire language(s) from which they are derived have not been fully mastered. Our research focuses on what type of features are used by Greek teenagers in digital environments and what social functions are served by the linguistic choices made by them.
The data needed for the linguistic analysis will be compiled from a total number of twenty pupils from two secondary schools in the Thessaloniki area. The AUTH group has secured access to the Facebook profiles of all twenty pupils in order to monitor and to analyse the ways the teenagers communicate digitally and the group and pupils will be in frequent contact with each other to discuss the progress of the research and to gain any useful insights into the reasons behind some of their linguistic choices. In line with research ethics of this nature, every step has been taken to ensure complete anonymity and security of the pupils’ data and personal details.
The final aim of our research is to utilise the knowledge acquired from the analysis of the linguistic data in order to design and test new teaching material for secondary school Greek classes throughout Greece in order to enhance pupils’ critical awareness of the language they use, in what settings, with whom and for what purposes. It is our hope that this will assist in restructuring the current syllabus and make future language classes more representative of the actual ways with which language is used by teenagers.
Online advertising and creating tourist destinations: The case of Greek National Tourism Organization
In the realm of the travel and the tourism industry, destination branding has grown considerably in importance over the years. According to Destination Branding Strategy, every National Tourism Organisation’s purpose is to demonstrate a destination’s most attractive characteristics and to build up an image based on a positive reputation.
In this work I explore the ways in which the Greek National Tourism Organization has promoted Greece’s assets all over the world and has stayed up to date with advances in new technologies repositioning Greece in the new digital landscape. With the emphasis primarily placed on the GNTO’s online presence, I discuss the overall marketing plan and how it was enriched into an online marketing strategy through the creation of multimedia content and the use of ICTs, the evolution of the GNTO websites and the creation of the www.visitgree.gr portal in its present-day form. Throughout this study I examine what eDestination (or Online) Branding is all about: the creation of new branded content; the virtual dialogues with the country’s followers and friends; the use of the imagery of Greece—as social media platforms facilitate the sharing of photos; the ways in which tourists capture momentary experiences in a microblogging post; the introduction of novel promotional tools such as the monthly newsletter, the my-greece microsite, etc.
I base the analysis of a specialized corpus of posts and texts on the theoretical tools of Tourism Discourse, Multimodality Theory, Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA or Discourse 2.0), and Destination Branding. The underlying goal is to show: (a) how in a computer-mediated communication environment –online– multimodality texts realise the fundamental systems of meaning that constitute a country’s culture; (b) how a country positions itself via the choice of the combination of semiotic modes (i.e. writing, image & video), and (c) how the grammar of language and the grammar of visual communication form a system of functional-semantic choices made to create messages that influence online audiences. For all these purposes, close attention is paid to the analysis of the co-deployment of a combination of different semiotic resources as well as the constraints imposed by each social medium (e.g. technological facets that characterise the medium, determined by the associated software).
This study contributes to the AUTH group research project in the following ways:
• Introduces a variety of digital genres (posts, tweets, blogs, etc.) as a new teaching language material addressing teenagers who are actively involved in the computer (or “digitally” as proposed by Crystal, 2010) mediated communication as themselves produce content on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms.
• For the first time, Greek pupils will discover Tourism as an important economic pillar of the Greek economy through the presentation of the promotional content the Greek Tourism Organisation has produced from the beginning of the 19th century with the creation of posters, past the typical advertising campaigns to finally reach the digital era with the creation of the www.visitgreece.gr portal. Pupils will witness so called “resemiotization” (Iedema, 2003), that is, the multi-semiotic practice according to which Greece entered the online world.
• Finally, branded content, that is, multimodal digital content created to promote Greece’s assets all over the world and to build its image as a unique tourism destination will enrich and reform the current language syllabus.
Members of the AUTH group
Periklis Politis, Associate Professor in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Principal Investigator)
Dimitris Koutsogiannis, Associate Professor in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Evangelos Kourdis, Assistant Professor in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Jannis Androutsopoulos, Professor in Hamburg University (Invited Researcher)
Sonia Kefalidou, PhD student in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Christopher Lees, PhD student in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Elli Vazou, PhD student in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
The AUTH group is involved with three central research strands for the development of high school students' critical literacy:
- TV news narratives
- Digital literacy practices on social media
- Online advertising
Analysis of TV News Narratives: Their Applicability for the Purposes of Critical Literacy
This research project conducted by the AUTH group is mainly concerned with the linguistic analysis of narratives embedded in TV news texts as well as with the approach of the latter as instantiations of narrative discourse. The project is aiming to formulate a unified proposal for the instruction of narrative in secondary Greek-language classes, such that serves the purposes of critical language awareness, by designing new teaching material enriched with TV news texts.
Current trends in the approach of narrative discourse, both literal and conversational, tend to agree that narrative is -beyond its discursive or, indeed, any other kind of semiotic realization- a universal semiotic mode, inherent to human cognition, that provides thematic interpretive patterns for shaping and configuring reality in a meaningful way. In addition, narrative discourse is unanimously considered to be the field where speakers’ and hearers’ identities are inscribed and realized, including their positioning with respect to overarching, master and counter narratives, the field where individual and social conceptualizations of regularity and its disruption are circulated and negotiated.
Contrary to the above, the current teaching approach undertaken by Greek secondary language courses concerning narrative was found in a preliminary research conducted by our team (Kefalidou & Politis, 2013) to ignore the centrality of narrative to both thinking and the construction of identities, failing to treat its instruction as a vehicle to the enhancement of students’ critical linguistic awareness. For one thing, it treats narrative as a mode of discourse rather than a way of thinking. Furthermore, it focuses the analysis of its special properties in mainly linguistic texts the majority of which are furthermore taken from the field of literature.
Following Koutsogiannis (2012), we analyze such deficiencies as stemming from both the specific metalanguage adopted by the textbooks and the selection of specific texts that are supposed to instantiate narrative. Our team, therefore, proposes an alternative teaching approach to narrative, one that combines a cognitive-semiotic analysis with discourse-analytical tools and practices. The advantages of the revision of the textbooks’ metalanguage along these lines include the uniform approach of texts as narratives irrespectively of their semiotic encoding and the foregrounding of subjectivity and ideology as dimensions incorporated in our narrative grasp and presentation of reality and, therefore, as forces that structure our narrative discourse.
In complete alignment with our view of narrative lies our analysis of TV news narratives and the research’s proposal to include the latter in the sample texts exemplifying narrative for teaching purposes. Being multimodal, they allow students to critically think about the various aspects of narrative meaning undertaken by either the visual or the linguistic code. Furthermore, once their contribution to the social construction of “truthful discourse” is beyond dispute, their study serves a very central aim of critical school literacy, the enhancement of the students’ ability to read texts as discursive “battlefields”, as the products of socially situated agents who are not granted the same degree of social power and are bound by the restrictions (and favored by the advantages) of their social status.
Indicatively, the study of TV news narratives then focuses inter alia on the following subjects:
- The embedment of narratives in TV news texts: how are they integrated so as to serve the “designed” overall truth of the text? Which is their contribution to the overall meaning of the text? What windows do they open to various “possible worlds”? How can their alternative interpretations lead to the deconstruction of the global truth of the text?
- TV news texts as narrative discourse: how can a cognitive-semiotic approach to narrative apply to TV news texts, including some of them as instances of narrative discourse while excluding others? We further scrutinize issues that pertain to the story level, such as the way that TV news narratives reflect what is socially construed as regularity and its breach or the “virtual” casting of roles to the participants of the presented events. With respect to the discourse-level, we examine the semiotic means by which the narrative meaning is (re-) constructed with special attention to perspectivization and focalization matters.
- Real time or serial narration and non-closure TV news texts: instantiating a special case on narration, TV news items that are subjected to consecutive updates from one broadcast to the other offer the opportunity to monitor the emplotment process in real time and to record the stage by stage interpretation of an event as it develops into a story.
The digital literacy practices of teenagers: The case of Facebook and its implications for critical literacy
This research project currently being carried out by theAUTH group aims to understand and produce an ethnographical account of the digital literacy practices observed in teenagers in the last two classes of Greek secondary schools. Due to the prominent role new technology plays in the lives of teenagers in modern society, the various types of interaction teenagers engage in with digital resources are expected to define to a major extent their literacy development.
Thus, our research involves the study of various forms of language used by teenagers when interacting with each other in digital spaces and focuses on three particular areas:
- The mixing of oral and written conventions in digital communication
- The use of the Latin alphabet in Greek computer mediated discourse
- The role of English in the teenagers’ digital communication
In the case of the use of the Latin instead of the Greek alphabet in computer mediated discourse, researchers have tried to interpret the reasons for its continued use despite the original technological limitations being solved (Androutsopoulos 2009). Current theories seem to attribute the continued use, especially by teenagers, to an affiliation with modern and global trends, for which the Latin script and English in general have a special identity value (Koutsogiannis 2012). Our research aims to link the usage of the Latin script in Greek digital communication to various social variables such as social and educational background, as well as to gain insight into the teenagers’ own stances and interpretations of the reasons they use the Latin script.
Finally, regarding the role of English, recent studies show that the traditional approach to interpreting English loanwords in Greek i.e. borrowing is no longer sufficient in light of the new trends of incorporating entire phrase and sentence structures from English into Greek which have not been assimilated into the Greek language but result from the users’ exposure to alternative linguistic resources from the media, the Internet etc. As a result, current research is moving away from the traditional approach to assess the tendency that people have in late modern societies to make use of features from various languages, even if the entire language(s) from which they are derived have not been fully mastered. Our research focuses on what type of features are used by Greek teenagers in digital environments and what social functions are served by the linguistic choices made by them.
The data needed for the linguistic analysis will be compiled from a total number of twenty pupils from two secondary schools in the Thessaloniki area. The AUTH group has secured access to the Facebook profiles of all twenty pupils in order to monitor and to analyse the ways the teenagers communicate digitally and the group and pupils will be in frequent contact with each other to discuss the progress of the research and to gain any useful insights into the reasons behind some of their linguistic choices. In line with research ethics of this nature, every step has been taken to ensure complete anonymity and security of the pupils’ data and personal details.
The final aim of our research is to utilise the knowledge acquired from the analysis of the linguistic data in order to design and test new teaching material for secondary school Greek classes throughout Greece in order to enhance pupils’ critical awareness of the language they use, in what settings, with whom and for what purposes. It is our hope that this will assist in restructuring the current syllabus and make future language classes more representative of the actual ways with which language is used by teenagers.
Online advertising and creating tourist destinations: The case of Greek National Tourism Organization
In the realm of the travel and the tourism industry, destination branding has grown considerably in importance over the years. According to Destination Branding Strategy, every National Tourism Organisation’s purpose is to demonstrate a destination’s most attractive characteristics and to build up an image based on a positive reputation.
In this work I explore the ways in which the Greek National Tourism Organization has promoted Greece’s assets all over the world and has stayed up to date with advances in new technologies repositioning Greece in the new digital landscape. With the emphasis primarily placed on the GNTO’s online presence, I discuss the overall marketing plan and how it was enriched into an online marketing strategy through the creation of multimedia content and the use of ICTs, the evolution of the GNTO websites and the creation of the www.visitgree.gr portal in its present-day form. Throughout this study I examine what eDestination (or Online) Branding is all about: the creation of new branded content; the virtual dialogues with the country’s followers and friends; the use of the imagery of Greece—as social media platforms facilitate the sharing of photos; the ways in which tourists capture momentary experiences in a microblogging post; the introduction of novel promotional tools such as the monthly newsletter, the my-greece microsite, etc.
I base the analysis of a specialized corpus of posts and texts on the theoretical tools of Tourism Discourse, Multimodality Theory, Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA or Discourse 2.0), and Destination Branding. The underlying goal is to show: (a) how in a computer-mediated communication environment –online– multimodality texts realise the fundamental systems of meaning that constitute a country’s culture; (b) how a country positions itself via the choice of the combination of semiotic modes (i.e. writing, image & video), and (c) how the grammar of language and the grammar of visual communication form a system of functional-semantic choices made to create messages that influence online audiences. For all these purposes, close attention is paid to the analysis of the co-deployment of a combination of different semiotic resources as well as the constraints imposed by each social medium (e.g. technological facets that characterise the medium, determined by the associated software).
This study contributes to the AUTH group research project in the following ways:
• Introduces a variety of digital genres (posts, tweets, blogs, etc.) as a new teaching language material addressing teenagers who are actively involved in the computer (or “digitally” as proposed by Crystal, 2010) mediated communication as themselves produce content on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms.
• For the first time, Greek pupils will discover Tourism as an important economic pillar of the Greek economy through the presentation of the promotional content the Greek Tourism Organisation has produced from the beginning of the 19th century with the creation of posters, past the typical advertising campaigns to finally reach the digital era with the creation of the www.visitgreece.gr portal. Pupils will witness so called “resemiotization” (Iedema, 2003), that is, the multi-semiotic practice according to which Greece entered the online world.
• Finally, branded content, that is, multimodal digital content created to promote Greece’s assets all over the world and to build its image as a unique tourism destination will enrich and reform the current language syllabus.
Members of the AUTH group
Periklis Politis, Associate Professor in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Principal Investigator)
Dimitris Koutsogiannis, Associate Professor in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Evangelos Kourdis, Assistant Professor in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Jannis Androutsopoulos, Professor in Hamburg University (Invited Researcher)
Sonia Kefalidou, PhD student in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Christopher Lees, PhD student in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Elli Vazou, PhD student in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki