Resumen

Classical semiotic approaches are too narrow to investigate the didactical phenomena in the mathematics classroom. In addition to the standard semiotic resources used by students and teachers (e.g. written symbols and speech), other important semiotic ressources include also gestures, glances, drawings and extra linguistic modes of expressions. However, these semiotic ressurces fit with difficulties within the constraints of the classical definitions of semiotic systems. To overcome such difficulties I adopt a vygotskian approach and present an enlarged notion of semiotic system, the semiotic bundle, which reveals particularly useful for framing all the semiotic resources we find in the learning processes in mathematics. The paper stresses some critical points in the usual description of the semiotic systems; it discusses the multimodal and embodied paradigm, which is emerging in these last years from researches in psycholinguistics and neuroscience and analyses gestures from a semiotic point of view. Then it introduces the notion of semiotic bundle and exemplifies it through a case study.