How do we know he is not talking about himself? Demonstrations in Science Classroom

Although the development of the sciences was mediated in crucial ways by the development of visual representations, language continues to be treated as the dominant representational mode in science teaching. In this study, we focus on instances where demonstrations occur, in which self-references are to be understood as references in general, and investigate the semiotic resources provided by the lecturer to disambiguate references from self-references. Our data corpus is derived from a 3-month study of twelfth-grade biology lessons in human anatomy and physiology. We analyzed all those instances where the lecturer makes reference to someone else in his speech but gestures with or points to his own body. We describe the different resources (markers) used to disambiguate the conflation of self-reference and reference and theorize the phenomenon by building on a dialectical framework for understanding communication.