Semiotic Analysis of Electronic Mathematical Texts

This dissertation comes to answer an increasing need for an analysis tool that enables to analyze and evaluate electronic mathematical texts which populate the internet and serve the mathematics teacher as additional texts for school students. These texts are web based and include dynamic components which the user can work with, in order to learn mathematics. The dissertation contains two parts: the first part provides an analyzing system for electronic mathematical texts. This analyzing system was founded on Morris's (1938) formal semiotics and Halliday's (1985) and Morgan's (1998) social semiotics. The second part of the dissertation describes preservice teachers' work with the semiotic system for analyzing and evaluating electronic mathematical texts, their opinions of this system, and their arguments with or against the utility and importance of the various aspects of the semiotic system. To analyze the preservice arguments, Toulmin's argumentation model was used. This model describes arguments in terms of grounds, qualifiers, claims, warrants, rebuttals, and backings, so the model enables to analyze deeply the structure and meanings of the arguments.