Designing Prospective Professional Identities: Multimodal Meaning-making in Video Curricula

This article explores multimodal meaning-making in a small corpus of 47 video curricula, recorded by undergraduate students in a Business English course at the University of Trento. The adopted methodology combines tools derived from genre analysis, multimodal analysis, and narrative analysis. The research question is the following: how do students select and integrate semiotic resources in a video curriculum to design their prospective professional identities? The results show that academic students as job applicants use a range of modes and modal resources (e.g., speech, eye contact, angle, icons, music) to design and communicate their future professional identities and to engage with their potential recruiter. A pervasive and noteworthy technique in the dataset is that of storytelling. Multimodally realized through speech, writing, gestures and other modes, storytelling is used to perform self-narration and to shape prospective professional identities. Hence, the examined multimodal...