This paper presents findings from a research project on classroom communication focusing on how classroom designs affect students’ and teachers’ communication.

Classroom designs affect social relations and different designs provide different affordances (Selander & Kress, 2010:42). Classroom design traditionally focuses on the school subject being taught. This is for example realised through foregrounding of certain artefacts. Classrooms in secondary education tend to be traditional and static environments, built to suit particular school subjects, and furnishings and positioning are designed to provide ample lighting and ergonomic work stations. Preschools tend to have more diverse and flexible designs, and positions in the rooms and relations between participants vary (Granly & Maagerø, 2012; Elm Fristorp, 2012). How children and furniture in preschool classrooms are arranged reflects teachers’ ambitions to maintain open social relations (Elm Fristorp, 2012:142). In contrast, in primary and secondary school, classroom designs create an increasingly clearer distinction between teacher and student arenas (Björklid, 2005:94). 

This paper addresses one research questions; how do classroom designs and the use of these designs influence classroom communication?

In social semiotics, both communication and three dimensional spaces can be understood and analysed as communicating three metafunctions simultaneously; the ideational, the interpersonal, and the textual metafunction (Halliday & Mathiessen, 2004; O’Toole, 1994; Ravelli, 2008). Classroom design communicates an ideational meaning of its literal and symbolic functions (O’Toole, 1994) and classroom communication realises the “ideas” of the contents, also described as the register variable of field (Halliday & Mathiessen, 2004). The design of a classroom communicates interpersonal meaning of, for example, power relations (Ravelli, 2008) between participants, both between teacher and students, and between students, which in communication is categorized as the register variable tenor (Halliday & Mathiessen, 2004). The textual meaning that is communicated in classroom design can be understood through the paths and arenas (Stenglin, 2004) participants use and how these paths and arenas are accessible or made accessible to participants. The textual meaning in communication is here understood through the register variable of mode (Halliday & Mathiessen, 2004). How arenas, paths and artefacts are used in communication, along with participants’ positions, affect both the ideational and interpersonal meanings (Lim, 2011).

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