Vincent van Gogh, Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette, 1885 — what it shows is simple; what it suggests is the lesson

Lesson 02: Semiotics — How Images Mean

Media Studies · Unit 2 · Lesson 02 of 16 · ← L01 | L03 →

At a glance

Days	4 — Mon+Tue two-day block, Wed double, Fri single
Dates	Mon 2026-09-07 · Tue 09-08 · Wed 09-09 · Fri 09-11
Band/Unit	U2 Media Language (S1 Unit 2)
AO focus	AO1
Deliverable	CS2 annotated media text from daily life
Feeds	A1
Homework	CS2 annotation task (set day 1, 72-hour rule), capped at 30 min per day

Goal

This week you take a sign apart and put it back together. You name connotation (the words worried, poor, desperate from the CS1 exit swap) and use Saussure’s terms to separate it from what an image denotes. You will see that connotation is cultural, not natural, using EN/ZH examples. You will study address — who a text thinks you are — and commit to the media area you will keep working on until May. Finally you name the caption’s power — anchorage — and hand in CS2.

How it runs

D1 — Mon 09-07: signifier, signified, and the parked list

• Starter (5 min) — the L01 parked list on the board, verbatim.
• Input (15 min) — from Deck U2.2: sign = signifier (the form) + signified (the idea); denotation vs connotation on a worked ad reading; polysemy — one image, several legitimate readings.
• Stations (20 min) — eight images around the room, two columns per image in the sketchpad: shows / suggests. A “suggests” entry must point at the signifier that triggers it.
• Close (5 min) — the theory-card spine starts: use WS 2.1’s card template. Two cards tonight — Saussure and Barthes. Every theorist from now on gets a card; the box stays on the shelf until June. CS2 is set now (an everyday text, ≥6 code labels, 30-minute cap).

D2 — Tue 09-08: connotation is cultural

• Retrieval (5 min) — four questions, no notes: signifier / signified / denotation / connotation.
• Connotation chains (15 min) — in pairs, build chains from one signifier (rose → romance → Valentine’s → spending), then challenge each link: who taught you that?

Mummy portrait of a man wearing an ivy wreath, Roman Egypt, c. 101 CE — wreath, gold, gaze: codes at work for 1,900 years

• EN/ZH divergence (20 min) — colors and objects whose connotations split by culture: white (purity / mourning), red (danger / fortune), dragons, the number four. The coursebook color wheel (§2.4) is the frame. Add lexicon entries as you go.
• Written close (5 min) — using the coursebook §2.1 red-rose frame: two analytical sentences, one denoting, one connoting, with the connotation traced to its culture.

D3 — Wed 09-09 (double): modes of address, and the commitment

• Starter (10 min) — one advertisement on screen, one question: how old does this text think you are? Give evidence.
• Address profiling (40 min) — three contrasting texts; in small groups build an implied-reader profile for each: age, gender, income, knowledge assumed, mood invited, pronouns used. Groups swap and challenge each other’s profiles with evidence from the text.
• Synthesis (20 min) — formal vs informal address, direct vs indirect; texts don’t just find audiences, they construct them. Write one paragraph: “This text addresses me as … but I am …”
• The commitment (15 min) — commit to your media area, logged on the blog with one line of justification. It feeds the L12 case-study document and stays with you until May. You do not revisit this choice next week.

D4 — Fri 09-11: anchorage, and CS2

• Naming the mechanism (10 min) — L01’s Underwood stereograph returns: the caption that told you who the women were has a name — anchorage (Barthes): text pinning down which of a polysemic image’s meanings you take. Relay: when words and image take turns carrying the story.
• Caption swap (15 min) — one image, three captions per pair: one anchoring sympathy, one suspicion, one comedy. Read aloud; the image never changed.
• CS2 (15 min) — annotations out, peer-checked against the exemplar (six accurate labels is the bar), then collected.
• Exit (5 min) — one sentence: “The most powerful caption I saw this week was … because …”

Assessment

Item	Date	What	AO
CS2	Fri 2026-09-11	Annotated everyday media text, ≥6 accurate code labels; homework-based, set day 1 (72-hour rule)	AO1

Milestone: you commit to your media area on Wed 09-09 — it feeds the C2 case-study document opened in L12. See the full register.