Gunther Kress is Professor of Semiotics and Education at the Institute of Education, University of London. His interests are in communication and meaning (-making) in contemporary environments. His broad aims are to continue developing a social semiotic theory of multimodal communication; and, in that, to develop an apt theory of learning and apt means for the ‘recognition’ and ‘valuation of learning’. Some books along the road are: Language as Ideology; Social Semiotics (both with Bob Hodge); Before Writing: rethinking the paths to literacy; Reading Images: the grammar of graphic design; Multimodal Discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication (both with Theo van Leeuwen); Literacy in the new media age; Multimodality: a social semiotic approach to contemporary communication.
Len Unsworth is Professor in English and Literacies Education at the Australian Catholic University in Sydney, Australia. Len’s research is in primary and secondary school English and multiliteracies education. His book publications include Teaching Multiliteracies Across the Curriculum (Open University Press) and [with Angela Thomas, Alyson Simpson and Jenny Asha] Teaching children’s literature with Information and Communication Technologies (McGraw-Hill/Open University Press 2005), e-literature for children and classroom literacy learning (Routledge, 2006), New Literacies and the English Curriculum (Continuum, 2008), Multimodal Semiotics (Continuum, 2008) and, with Clare Painter and Jim Martin, Reading Visual Narratives (Equinox, 2013).
Francis Robert Low is Teaching fellow at the Department of English, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His area of study and research is Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and specialized in Multimodality and Multisemiotics. As an active member of the PolySystemic Research Group, a Systemic Functional Linguistic working group with a regional focus in the Pearl River Delta, China and Southeast Asia, which has extended as an international research network. Francis Low devotes in research on Systemic Functional Linguistics and Multimodal Discourse Analysis in general. His main contribution in recent years are ‘text+’ which is a model for multi-semiotic resources integration in meaning making, quantification of images, natural language processes in machine, image theory development and image typology influenced by Matthiessen’s work. Other research interest are time and space in comics, image archiving, image analysis software for teaching and research, image studies and interdisciplinary curriculum such as legal discourse analysis, classroom discourse, images in public health education, images in adverts, business websites, multi-literacy etc.
Viviane M. Heberle holds a doctorate in English Language and Applied Linguistics from Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil, and is a funded researcher of CNPq (the Brazilian National Research Council). She taught courses for the Bachelor of Education Honors Degree at Westhill College, Birmingham, UK, and was a Visiting Scholar at The Faculty of Education and Social Work at The University of Sydney, Australia. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in English Language, Critical Discourse Analysis and Applied Linguistics at UFSC, with special research interests in multiliteracies and multimodality, language and gender and teacher education.
Dr. Feng Dezheng completed his PhD at the Multimodal Analysis Lab, National University of Singapore in 2012. He is currently a Research Assistant Professor at the Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His main research area is multimodal discourse analysis in the context of promotional/recreational media (advertising and film) and education (multiliteracies). He has published over a dozen of research articles in international and Chinese journals, such as Journal of Pragmatics, Visual Communication, Semiotica, Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 现代外语，当代语言学，外国语，etc.
Dr. Zhang Yiqiong is Associate Professor at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (China), and adjunct researcher at the National Key Research Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics at GDUFS. She obtained her PhD degree from the National University of Singapore in 2013. Her research interests include multimodal discourse analysis, multiliteraices, English for Academic Purposes, and cross-cultural studies. Her publications appear in Semiotica, Critical Discourse Studies, Discourse & Communication, etc. She has been invited to lecture on multimodal discourse analysis at Utrecht Summer School 2013, The Netherlands.
Nancy GUO is a PhD candidate and a visiting lecturer of Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include language education, material design, literacy development, and multisemiotic studies. Her PhD study aims to explore the Hong Kong primary and secondary textbooks as multi-semiotic resources to scaffold students' multilitercies. She has also been associated with other various research projects on language education in HK, including investigating the usage of clause complex in students' writing, exploring teachers' writing during their in-service teaching training, etc. She has been invited to lecture in Department of Linguistics and English Language of Lancaster University, UK; and English Department of Bremen Univeristy, Germany.
