Multisemiotic artifacts and academic discourse of Economics: Knowledge construction in the Textbook genre

To identify the genres that open access to disciplinary knowledge and to describe their prototypical features, assuming their multisemiotic status, are fundamental tasks in order to understand the functioning of academic discourse and the discourse processes through which students become members of a particular academic community. In this context, we are interested in the access to specialized knowledge in Economics through an academic genre: the university Textbook. The objectives of this study are to identify and describe the multisemiotic artifacts that help construct meaning in ten textbooks that introduce first year students to the study of Economics. Besides, we aim at determining the frequency of occurrence of these artifacts in the corpus. The application of Parodi's (2010a) methodological proposal helped identify seven artifacts: Statistics Complex, Diagram, Formula, Graphic, Icon, Illustration, and Table. The findings show that the academic Economics discourse that is built though this genre employs mainly formulae, graphics and tables, all of them are high frequency multisemiotic artifacts that support the pedagogical communicative purpose of the genre Textbook.