A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of English Posters in Violence Awareness Campaigns against Women Souad Belgrimet The University of Jordan, Jordan Ghaleb Rabab'ah The University of Sharjah, UAE Abstract—The present study seeks to delve into the intricacies of multimodal discourse analysis with regard to violence against women awareness campaign posters. To this end, a study is conducted on English posters. In this respect, the different semiotic modes adopted in English posters were put under scrutiny. Similarly, the study attempts to explore how the adoption of different semiotic modes may contribute to the construction of meaning when cooperating with language. To this end, three English posters were selected from different electronic sources and put under investigation. The qualitative analysis of the yielded results was couched with Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) Visual Grammar framework. The findings indicate that English posters employed a variety of semiotic modes. By the same token, the yielded results indicate that the majority of the sampled posters are conceptual. Such visual characterization demonstrates that the English posters tend to be static and immovable. Index Terms—multimodal discourse analysis, awareness campaigns on violence against women, English posters, visual grammar I. INTRODUCTION The study of language has long been a matter of great interest for linguists in particular and the large public in general. Accordingly, a number of approaches came to the fore bringing about new instances of the different uses and functions of language. However, in recent years, a new approach to the study of discourse has taken center stage, namely: Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA). In fact, although the multimodality of discourse has received a fair bit of attention long time ago, scholars have only realized its importance quite recently. Such interest reached its peak with the pioneering work of the two forerunners of multimodality: Kress and Van Leeuwen. Indeed, in 1996, they developed a theoretical framework well known as “Visual Grammar” or “Grammar of Visual Design” further developed in 2006. At the core of this theory is the belief that although language is a very important resource in discourse, yet it needs to coordinate with other resources in the process of meaning-making. As explicitly evinced by Van Leeuwen (2015), multimodality was adopted and investigated in a range of disciplines: advertisement, health communication, mass media, political discourse, movies and education. As far as educational discourse is concerned, the New London Group stimulated an interest in applying multimodal analysis to education. Such interest paves the way to the development of different types of multimodal studies. Among these, the studies dealing with the development of literacy in young children. Such studies were conducted with an eye towards the inclusion of multimodal literacy in the curriculum such as the call for integrating both receptive and productive skills. In a similar standpoint, some studies casted light on the learning resources as their point of departure. That is, the emphasis was on whether a single learning instrument is used or different instruments such as textbooks, internet, and toys are combined and adopted to promote the teaching/learning process. Another type of multimodal studies dealing with education revolves around multimodal classroom interaction. The latter involves a shift of emphasis from the traditional focus on the grammatical structures exchanged during interaction to the contextual patterns and scrutinized attention to nonverbal communication and setting. In this regard, the paper at hand seeks to throw light on the set of semiotic modes employed in English posters dealing with violence against women. Being a major construct in the present study, it seems important at the outset to cast light on the different aspects of such a phenomenon. In fact, in the United Nations Declaration of the Elimination of Violence against Women (VAW) that took place in 1993, VAW was defined as a health and human issue resulting from gender-based violence. The latter appears to have both physical and psychological harms on women. Similarly, such violence may take place in social or private contexts. From another perspective, upon trying to delve into the intricacies of awareness campaigns, Lamb (1997) defined an awareness campaign as any conscious, purposeful effort aimed at targeting a given audience and therefore raising their awareness towards a given phenomenon and highlighting the dire need to take action. By doing so, public pressure is meant to increase in order to change and improve the behavior of individuals and institutions. In a similar standpoint, ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 191-201, February 2021 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1102.12 © 2021 ACADEMY PUBLICATION