VISUALS & TEXT

“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
― Oscar Wilde

The lesson on the use of visuals in ELT has given me a chance to reflect on the visible but often neglected aspect of my learning and teaching experience. Up to now, I can still vividly recall my English teacher sitting at his desk and gluing magazine-cutouts onto his hand-made worksheets before every lesson. In retrospect, most of the images were just for decoration, but he remained the only teacher I met that spent that much time and effort on the visual elements of learning materials. Regarding my own teaching, due to the uniformity of handout design in my school, I decided instead to choose the Powerpoint slides as my creative outlet. To supplement the main handouts in a lesson, I often include pictures, videos, or graphs, along with a minimal amount of text, to prompt discussions or facilitate activities. Without those visuals, my lesson would seem much less lively.

Even though visuals have always been a part of my lessons, I did not pay enough attention to the extent to which they influence my students. Therefore, in this post, I will look at the benefits of visuals on the learning process, how they can be used properly, how to evaluate their effectiveness, and also report my first attempt at creating an infographic.

Benefits of visuals

Walker and White (2013) mentioned a list of reasons for the use of visuals to support language learning and the two points I found intriguing are as follow:

Firstly, as students nowadays live in a “highly visual culture”, teachers can meet their expectations by making use of images in the classrooms. This comes from the idea that the world we live in uses visuals as one of the main vehicles for transferring information (Callow 2005). Some teachers might interpret this as images are being used more in modern society than in the past and they have to fight harder than ever for students’ attention. However, after the in-class discussion on cave art, I realised that visuals have always been present in our lives, even before the creation of written language. Then, it is not that visuals are being used more frequently, but, in my opinion, they are being transformed in a way that their impact on human beings is maximised. Thus, teachers should study how visuals can affect, or even manipulate, people because only by understanding something thoroughly can people keep control or adapt it to their will.

Secondly, visuals might be used to form “a void which needs to be filled by language” (Keddie 2009, in Walker & White 2013). If the aim of a lesson is for students to practice meaningful use of language, it would be much more achievable by bringing the real world into the classroom through photos and videos. Teachers can use them as prompts to start discussions which relate to students’ own experiences. Moreover, students can share those images on social networks or photo-sharing websites to receive comments from an audience beyond the classroom context. In brief, it would be a huge loss to not include the use of visuals in a language classroom.

Multimodality & language learning

To gain a deeper understanding of the potential of visuals, it is important to be aware of the multimodal aspect of language teaching and learning. In a language classroom, students can take part in activities involving different modes – writing, speaking, movement, etc. which help them understand the lesson thoroughly from different perspectives. Walker and White (2013) stated that “presenting information simultaneously through different modes allows for a fuller and deeper understanding”. In a traditional classroom, using different modes at the same time might not be possible due to limited resources. Luckily, with the help of technology, teachers and students can now go beyond the classroom boundary by combining, modifying and remixing various modes to create new materials which include sound, text, and images. In addition, whenever there is a need for further clarification during a lesson, information could be found immediately online through individual or collaborative effort, which also encourages students to use language with a real purpose.

Similarly, Brown (2015: 601) emphasised the importance of “transmediation”, which is “the process of realizing our understanding from one mode in another”. The author described how, in a lesson on “count/mass distinction”, asking students to visualise words could help them to grasp the essence of the grammatical point being raised. Moreover, because students had to work with each other to explore and come up with their own ideas, it will be easier for them to remember what they found instead of just listening to and accepting the teacher’s knowledge. In other words, grammatical rules are no longer rigid but instead can be “interacted with, altered, and created”, which empowers learners to be in control of their own learning.

Upon reflection, I now realise that most of my Writing and Reading lesson plans still rely heavily on the use of text. However, this might come from the fact that most academic English materials often do not focus on integrating visuals into lesson design. Thus, I will attempt to analyse the use of visuals in the IELTS coursebook “IELTS Mindset” to see how this aspect can be improved.

Analysing the use of visuals

The series “IELTS Mindset” is one of the newest materials for IELTS preparation from Cambridge University Press. Using Duchastel’s (1980) taxonomy for illustrations in instructional texts, I will evaluate how images have been used in Unit 1 of the Student’s book (Foundation level).

Firstly, I analysed the unit based on Hill’s (2013) classification of illustrations and found out that there were six colour photos, six colour drawings, and one graph. With the six photographs of real people, all of them do not have any specific use and only exist as decoration. According to Duchastel’s taxonomy, these photos were designed for “affective” reasons, which means they are used mainly to motivate and gain interest from students. However, I think some of the photos were not even successful in this purpose. For example, my first impression of the first photo was that it does not represent precisely the topic “Daily Life” – it could be anything from “Family” to “Food”. A better option, in my opinion, would be a compilation of different images portraying daily activities.

Next, out of the six drawings, only two have specific tasks accompanying them.

While the first one has words under each picture, the second requires students to finish the sentences in their own words. The use of pictures in the first task could be described as “supportive” as it allows the students who do not know the meaning of the new vocabulary to guess its meaning. Also, for both tasks, it can be argued that the pictures may help students to memorise the words better – this is the “retentional” role of visuals in learning materials.

Lastly, one graph was used to illustrate the grammar points of this lesson:

While it makes sense to illustrate the meaning of adverbs of frequency in a linear style, I think there are better ways to represent this point. For example, as these adverbs are explained in percentage, pie charts can be used to quickly compare their differences:

In conclusion, Unit 1 of “ILETS Mindset” has failed to maximise the potential of visuals in the lesson due to the fact that only a small number of images were integrated into practice tasks. To overcome this shortcoming, I suggest teachers including visuals they found or created on their own, like the example graph above, which can be done easily with infographic tools. Therefore, in the last section, I will explain how I designed an infographic to supplement my Writing lesson in the future.

Infographics

Infographics are defined as a tool to visually represent “dense statistical information” (Peachey 2013). At first, I was looking for readily-available infographics online but the ones I could find only focus on some aspects of process writing (e.g. compare between ‘revising’ and ‘editing’). Thus, I decided to create one myself using the Piktochart website. This website was chosen thanks to its friendly user-interface with a wide range of icons and text fonts for freemium users. Not until I started to make my own infographics did I realise how easy it is to condense a great amount of data onto a single page and present it a visually appealing way. However, the only downside was that it took me two hours to create one page of infographics because I was not familiar with the different functions on the site. Hopefully, the minimum time to create one infographic will decrease in the future as I become more skillful in designing graphs.

Some people might argue that using an infographic in class is no different from asking students to draw a mind map on paper by themselves. However, with an infographic tool, students have an unlimited amount of space to work with and express their creativity. Moreover, a digital tool like this will encourage students’ collaboration by allowing them to share templates and work together to collect and insert other online resources. Besides, regarding English for Academic Purposes, I will try my best to exploit infographics and adapt them into my lesson plans due to the fact that my students, who are preparing for the IELTS, will have to write essays describing a graph or a process in the first section of their Writing test.

Conclusion

Visuals have a huge potential in elevating an English lesson in terms of motivating students and facilitating their understanding. Nevertheless, it is up to the users to explore all the possibilities and integrate them into and beyond the classroom.

References

Brown, D. J. (2015) Approaching the Grammatical Count/Mass Distinction from a Multimodal Perspective. TESOL Quarterly 49 (3): 601-608. doi: 10.1002/tesq.243.

Callow, J. (2005) Literacy and the visual: Broadening our vision. English Teaching 4(1): 6.

Hill, D. A. (2013) The visual element in EFL coursebooks. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed) Developing Materials for Language Teaching. (2nd edn) London: Bloomsbury. 157-166.

Keddie, J. (2009) Images. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Peachey, N. (2013) Exploiting Infographics for ELT. Nik’s Quickshout. Available: < https://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/exploiting-infographics-for-elt.html> [Accessed 17 March 2018]

Walker, A. & White, G. (2013) Technology Enhanced Language Learning: Connecting theory and

practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.