Animation is widely acknowledged for dynamically visualizing information and has been increasingly used in educational context. However, the growing presence of educational animation has not been accompanied by well-informed studies that focus on the semiotic features of animation. An emerging perspective influenced by Social Semiotics and Systemic Functional Linguistics greatly complements the current trend of animation studies in the field of science education. Studies taking that perspective model animation as stratified systems (consisting of an expression plane and a content plane) of meaning-making options. Building on their work, this paper further develops the systems of animation on the two planes. Besides the concept of stratification, this paper also introduces a metafunctional perspective for the modeling of animation, focusing on building the ideational meaning system and textual meaning system for animation on the content plane based on an examination of online science animations. It is found that educational animation is not homogenous: animation can construe different human experience and can be used to fulfill different functions. The paper closes with a discussion of the advantages of adopting a stratified metafunctional model in studying animation and the implications for future studies in the field of multimodal semiotics and science education.

中文翻译：

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建立分层的动画元功能模型

动画因动态可视化信息而被广泛认可，并已越来越多地用于教育环境。但是，教育动画的出现与日俱增，但没有针对动画的符号学特征的消息灵通的研究。受社会符号学和系统功能语言学影响的新兴观点极大地补充了科学教育领域动画研究的当前趋势。以透视图模型动画作为意义选择选项的分层系统（由表达平面和内容平面组成）的研究。在他们的工作的基础上，本文进一步开发了两个平面上的动画系统。除了分层的概念，本文还介绍了动画建模的元功能视角，基于对在线科学动画的研究，着重于在内容平面上构建动画的概念意义系统和文本意义系统。发现教育动画不是同质的：动画可以解释不同的人类体验，并且可以用来实现不同的功能。本文最后讨论了采用分层元功能模型研究动画的优势以及对多模式符号学和科学教育领域的未来研究的意义。