READING GEOMETRICAL DIAGRAMS: A SUGGESTED
FRAMEWORK
Proceedings of The fourth YERME Summer School (YESS-4), (2008)Abstract
In my study, I intend to investigate the role of mathematical visual representations in the
construction of mathematical meaning. It has been argued that meaning does not reside
only in written and spoken language but also in other different modes of communication
such as visual representations, gestures and actions (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006;
Lemke, 1998; Morgan, 1996; O'Halloran, 1999).
Mathematics is a multimodal/multisemiotic discourse where different modes of
communication take place such as verbal language, algebraic notations, visual forms
and gesture. These different modes may offer different meanings or they may convey
one set of meanings (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). The verbal language in
(mathematical) texts, for instance, despite its power, has limited ability ‘to represent
spatial relations such as the angles of a triangle (..) or irrational ratios’ (Lemke, 1999, p.
175). Thus we need diagrams or algebraic notations to represent these qualities or
quantities enabling us to re-examine the argument. In the same manner, gestures help in
representing dynamic acts, which both language and visual representations have limited
ability to represent these acts. It is the deployment of all these (and other) modes which
carries the ‘unified’ meanings (Lemke, 1999).