The Experiential Meaning in Saudi Postgraduate Business Students’ Multimodal Accounting Texts: A Multidimensional Exploration^*

* The first author expresses his appreciation to the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Saud University, as well as the Research Center of the College of Arts for funding the current article. The authors are indebted to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments.

Abstract

The multimodal experiential meanings of accounting play a vital role in maximizing the learning experiences of accounting students. This paper aims to explore the literacy and numeracy practices of six Saudi postgraduate students enrolled in the Master of Commerce accounting foundation module Accounting Concepts and Methods. Responding to repeated calls regarding the lack of research on the literacy and numeracy practices that construe disciplinary subjects, we employed a multidimensional approach proposed by Alyousef to describe the epistemologies of the module and the actual practices the participants engaged with to complete their assignment, in addition to conducting a Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) of the experiential meanings in accounting texts. The SF-MDA enabled us to capture the patterns of such complicated interrelationships between numbers and texts. The findings of the analysis of the multimodal accounting financial statements demonstrated that systemic functional linguistics provides tools that structure interpretation of the functioning of multimodal texts.

Keywords:

• ESL/EFL
• Literacy and Numeracy Practices
• Experiential Meaning
• Business Discourse
• Accounting Literacies

ORCID

Hesham Suleiman Alyousef http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9280-9282"

Notes

* The first author expresses his appreciation to the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Saud University, as well as the Research Center of the College of Arts for funding the current article. The authors are indebted to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments.

1 That is, by ‘taking seriously what participants believe they are doing and what they think about their roles, relationships, and practices’ (Hyland 2004, 209).

2 http://www.go8.edu.au/

3 http://www.adelaide.edu.au/news/news14021.html

4 Source: Accounting Concepts & Methods Course Outline reader (The Business School 2009, p. 4).

Additional information

Funding

The first author expresses his appreciation to both the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Saud University and to the Research Center at the Faculty of Arts for funding the current article.