Construing chemistry knowledge through images: a social semiotics perspective

This article explores how chemical images in school chemistry realize knowledge from a social semiotics perspective. Drawing on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2021[1996]) visual grammar framework (Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design) and Doran and Martin’s (2021) field model (Field Relations: Understanding Scientific Explanation), this study reveals that these chemical images are characterized by employing recursive embeddings of analytical structures to realize multiple levels of compositional taxonomies of matter and multi-levelled taxonomy structures to expand the depth and breadth of classificational taxonomies of matter. These images employ a special narrative structure, referred to as the transformation process, to represent changes of matter. These processes can be complex in themselves or combined with agentive narrative processes to realize various activities related to changes of matter. Furthermore, chemical images utilize both symbolic and imagic resources to realize a wide range of properties associated with matter and its changes, with symbolic resources representing typological qualitative properties and images typically construing topological properties. These field meanings collectively shape part of the disciplinary affordance of chemical images in school chemistry in organizing chemistry knowledge. This study contributes to expanding the grammatical description of images to the discipline of chemistry.