Abstract

Traditionally, it is thought that learning and teaching are conducted primarily through the use of language resources. However, nowadays teaching materials have diversified the combinations of resources used to teach in the classroom. The multimodal perspective on communication allows us to consider the multiple semiotic resources that are assembled in materials for teaching - considered here as semiotic mediatorsand offer students a complex meaning that is constructed from multimodal integration. This study aims to explore the necessary characterization of reading skills to interpret teaching resources in Social Science lessons used in 4th grade in Chilean schools. The methodology used corresponds to a documentary study, which addresses the texts from the perspective of social semiotics. The theoretical and methodological tools used in the Multimodal Discourse Analysis correspond to curricular genres, epistemological potential, the halliday’s metafunctions and intersemiosis. Among the results we can highlight prototypical semiotic ways of demanding an giving information and the need for teachers to model multidirectional readings of the texts.