Page 11 - Tvorjenje pomena in večrazsežna – večkodna pismenost

Marianna Gergely The Composition and Decoding of Multimodal Biology
State Secondary School A. M. Slomšek Textbooks in Secondary Education
and State Secondary School F. Prešeren,
Italy
marianne.gergely@slomsek.edu.it As the primary instructional material aligned with the curriculum and designed
according to didactic-methodological principles, the textbook fulfils its function
© 2026 Marianna Gergely
through the didactic transformation and reduction of scientific discourse into
technical text (Štefanc, 2005). As a multimodal text, it integrates verbal and non-
verbal signs; this requires the readers to decode both simultaneously, thereby
increasing the complexity of interpretation (Starc, 2009, 2011; Rodela, 2019).
This paperfocuses onbiologytextbooks inSloveneintended foruppersecondary
school students (aged 15–19). We examine how the use of semiotic resources has
evolved from 1881 to 2022. By studying the differences in the composition of ver-
bal and pictorial signs, we analyse their communicative value using the visual
grammar of Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), as applied to the Slovenian context
by Starc (2009). Our findings indicate that, in biology textbooks, the pictorial ele-
ment increasingly plays a complementary role in relation to the verbal.
Furthermore, using a sample of secondary school students, we investigate how
independently they derive meaning from monomodal (purely pictorial or purely
verbal) and multimodal textbook texts. The results suggest that students primar-
ily extract information from the verbal component. Finally, we assess their abil-
ity to independently construct a multimodal text on the topic of mitosis, as pre-
sented in three different textbooks. In their own compositions, students mostly
synthesised the simplest, most easily understood verbal and pictorial signs – typ-
ically in a schematic fashion and with strong cohesion between the verbal and
the pictorial elements.

Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: The grammar of visual design
(2nd ed.). Routledge.
Rodela,M.(2019).Izraznasredstvamedosebnemetafunkcijevučbenikihzaslovenščino
kot materinščino v osnovni šoli [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Univerza
na Primorskem.
Starc, S. (2009). Časopisna oglaševalska besedila, reklame: struktura in večkodnost.
Annales.
Starc, S. (2011). Zmožnost dekodiranja večkodnih besedil kot sestava besedilne
pismenosti. In M. Cotič, V. Medved Udovič, & S. Starc (Eds.), Razvijanje ra-
zličnih pismenosti (str. 28–36). Annales.
Štefanc,D.(2005).Učbenikzvidikadidaktičneteorije:značilnosti,funkcije,kakovost
in problematika potrjevanja. Sodobna pedagogika, 56(4), 172–185.

Meaning-Making, Multiliteracies
and Multimodality
Abstracts of the International
Symposium
Koper, 19–20 March 2026

https://doi.org/10.26493/978-961-293-565-8.8 11