The emergence of semiotic resource complexes in the composing processes of young students in a literacy classroom context

•Semiotic resource complexes emerged as part the students’ multimodal composing processes.•These semiotic resources took on different forms, scopes, and roles.•The complexes consisted of resources from the gestural, spoken, written, and visual modes.•The semiotic resource complexes were socially constituted and ephemeral in character.

In this article, I present examples from a case study of the multimodal composing processes of two young students (age 5) in a literacy classroom context. Drawing upon a social semiotic perspective, I identified various types of semiotic resource complexes as emerging at particular junctures in the students’ composing processes. These resource complexes emerged during the course of composing, and were constituted both graphically and socially by social semiotic processes involving combinations of resources that centered on a particular node of meaning. I illustrate these semiotic resource complexes and describe their role in the students’ multimodal composing processes. These findings offer conceptual development that can be used heuristically to contribute to the broader goal of understanding the social semiotic character of multimodal composing processes of students in classroom contexts.