The world of signs and symbols: An english teacher's dilemma

Semiotics, the most vital and innate part of communication, has ironically not received so far, its share of attention by the language theorists. Semiotics is that branch of knowledge which deals with the study of signs and symbols that give a concrete shape to the abstract ideas. Semiotics is the study of signs, which obviously may consist of language, pictures, body language etc. Semioticians study how people interpret and construct a meaning of a particular sign, based upon their previous cultural or personal experiences. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), a founder of linguistics initiated the idea of semiotics in his renowned book ‘Course in General Linguistics’, in 1916. A few more noteworthy contributors to this field along with Saussure are Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles William Morris, Roland Barthes, Algirdas Greimas, Yuri Lotman, Christian Metz, Umberto Eco and Julia Kristeva.

This paper proposes to discuss how an English Teachers could benefit from the study of semiotics and could make teaching English as a second language a more enriching experience for the students. Till recent times, Semiotics had not been accepted as an academic discipline, thus, depriving the language teachers the basic skills of introducing words and their textual as well as contextual meaning in an effective manner. This forces the language teachers to grope in the dark when it comes to explaining the students about the various ideas and the signs associated with these ideas that are not familiar to the native students who are ignorant of the cultural context of those foreign ideas.