Is that clear? Does that make sense? Do you understand? These are questions I ask my students to ascertain if they have understood what has just been explained (verbally) or demonstrated (visually), in one way or another. But everything we show and say is open to interpretation by our learners, irrespective of our intent. These interpretations are rooted in who they are: their cultural backgrounds, context, personal beliefs, age and experience. Therefore, every meaning has countless other interpretations but through greater understanding of the target language and context, learners are better equipped to decode and work towards a truer interpretation and understanding. As Paul Slater said today: “if you know the code it will be transparent” and if you don’t it will remain rather murky.
As a language teacher I unsurprisingly rely heavily on language – spoken and written – to teach. Learners at beginner level arrive with no knowledge of the TL and this is expected and therefore my teaching and language reflect this. The coursebook that I use: French 1 (Palgraves, Second Edition) uses visual images: photographs and illustrations as “purely functional illustrations which have the aim of making comprehension of the language easier” and “which facilitate explicit teaching” (Hill 2013, p. 178). Their purpose is multi-faceted: attentive where it “need only to provoke the eye” (Duchastel 1978) and arguably retentional to aid memory. Corder termed this purpose of visuals in coursebooks as “talking about a picture” as opposed to the more meaningful and interpretative “talking with a picture” (Corder 1966, p.35 in Hill 2013). That being said, as a teacher I can adapt the visuals used and extend (McGrath 2016, p.70) them by asking questions that authentically engage the learners with the visual and in doing so encourages “talking with a picture” (Corder 1966, p.35).
In the pre-seminar task we were asked to analyse visuals from the English coursebook Face2Face. Greg and I chose to look at how it used illustrations in general and concentrated on page 14’s illustration in particular. In the entire coursebook there are 7 illustrations (in this style and format) in total. They are all similar in their appearance and bright colour. They have a comic strip style and appear fun. Two are “purely functional illustrations which have the aim of making comprehension of the language easier” and to “facilitate explicit teaching” (Hill 2013, p.178), whereas 5 are there to “stimulate a mental and linguistic response” and “facilitate tasks” (Hill 2013, p. 178). All of them, without teacher adaptation, allow for “talking about a picture”, as opposed to “talking with a picture” (Corder ibid), which would have allowed for greater “learner meaning making” (Hill 2013) and a discursive discussion.
The illustration on p14 doesn’t directly form part of an activity but visually illustrates a listening activity on idioms, the topic of the page. Each frame of the five frame strip contains text that explicitly states the idiom that has been literally represented in the illustration. It is attentive because it is there to attract leaners’ attention, didactic because it physically represents the literal meaning of an idiom and therefore making it easier to comprehend, even if the idiom’s meaning is not understood and also retentional, to help learners’ remember the idiom through colourful and fun imagery (Duchastel taxonomy 1978). The use of remembering idioms is dubious and will depend on the learner and how they intend to use the L2.
In the seminar Paul commented “normally text rescues an image” and in this case I don’t think either text or image is that mutually beneficial for the comprehension of idioms. I agree that there is an interdependency quite often between text and images, where the text is needed to understand the image. As McCloud states: “words and pictures amplify or elaborate each other” (1994) and although that is true here in terms of literal meaning, it doesn’t elaborate on the meaning of the visuals.
Idioms are situated within a culture and context and therefore difficult to teach and ultimately near enough impossible to understand by a L2 learner within the synthetic confines of a language classroom. Even with the visual and representation and the text literally spelling out the idiom, the meaning most probably will remain lost. That being said, the topic of idioms is interesting because although widely different, comparing and relating to an L2s idioms could make for interesting discussion, increase vocabulary and afford greater intercultural communicative competence, not only of the TL but of the learners’ culture, especially if they are from a variety of international backgrounds.
When I create materials, I am aware that I include “purely functional illustrations” as well as those that “stimulate a mental and linguistic response” (Hill 2013, p. 178), depending on the topic and activity. For my most recent class I created a task with photographic visuals with an affective, didactic and retentive purpose (Duchastel 1978). I created two sheets, Sheet A and Sheet B that contained the same photos of people. Sheet A had five names filled in and four blank and Sheet B had four named photos and five blank. The aim was for Learners A to describe the people they knew to Learner B and vice versa, so at the end, they knew who everyone was. The learning objective was for them to recall vocabulary and grammar for describing people and also allowed them to give opinions on character. See the task sheet here: Wk 15 Vous connaissez Pierre -1rq8cjz
When I designed this task I was very conscious of who the photos represented. I chose a vast age range, appearances and cultural backgrounds. I consciously avoided any stereotypical, religious or photos open to misinterpretation or misuse (see first blog ELT Materials Now on PARSNIP discussion). The photos were open to de-coding by the learners and their descriptions may have revealed as much about the people in the photos as it did about their own beliefs, values and culture. Learners working in pairs could negotiate descriptions through dialogue; questioning descriptions and perhaps re-coding what they saw.
In the class Paul spoke of the use of maps as visuals and how some people have difficulties decoding them. This is something I have never really thought about in my teaching and made me re-assess a task in our mid-year assessments, where learners must use a simple illustration of a map to describe a town. Students notably struggle with this activity in the assessment. Could this be because they didn’t know how to decode it? Perhaps they were not able to interpret its meaning and then put it into words. As I have previously said, my classes consist of international and multi-generational language learners and perhaps this map was out of their reach.
Multimodality is an extremely interesting area and arguably something that I don’t consciously think of when I teach and plan my lessons with use of the IWB, presentations, handouts and individual tasks that include video, QR code activities, Kahoot games and so on. I now feel the need to re-evaluate how I do use these and also want to exploit images further as believe that they could be the source for some really interesting conversations, even though Sless is “not clear what educational value images have” (1981, p.105). I personally feel they hold a lot of potential for unique language production, for extemporisation (McGrath 2016, p. 70) and celebrating the differentiation among my learners. Not only that but I agree with Thornbury (2012), that visualisation is key to remembering vocabulary because we think in images. Therefore exploiting images in class will arguably have a positive impact on leaners word learning and both receptive and productive use.
For my next week’s classes I want to re-evaluate my class presentations, handouts and in particular exploit images further. In particular, the next topic is on shopping and buying clothes and a BBC video that I use represents a couple shopping in a French clothes shop. I want to introduce this activity by freezing the opening scene and asking my students what they see (present tense) and what they think is going to happen (near future), repeating previous language as well as producing new vocabulary.
References:
Brown, D. J. (2015) Approaching the Grammatical Count/Mass Distinction from a Multimodal Perspective. TESOL Quarterly 49 (3): pp. 601-608.
Duchastel, P. C. (1978) Illustrating instructional texts. Educational Technology 18 36-39.
Hill, D. A. (2013) The visual element in EFL coursebooks. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed) Developing Materials for Language Teaching. (2nd edn) London: Bloomsbury. pp. 157-166.
McCloud, S. (1994). Show and Tell. In Understanding comics: The invisible art. New York: HarperPerennial.
McGrath (2016) Materials evaluation and Design For language teaching. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pp. 69 – 78
Sless, D. (1981) Learning and Visual Communication. London: Halsted Press.
Thornbury, S. 2002, How to teach vocabulary, Longman, Harlow.