For our last seminar one of the tasks we could choose to work on was to create an infographic to use in class. The other tasks were more to do with exploring what visuals added to language teaching materials and how/to what extent certain textbooks had achieved this. I do not need any convincing that visuals can enhance the learning process (in fact, I believe that the more senses you get involved the better!) and neither does it particularly surprise me that visual messages are often not encoded/decoded successfully, especially if the context is not understood sufficiently or known to the encoder/decoder. So I was quite happy to leave it to the seminar to address these issues.

What I wanted to do was to experiment with my own visual. As usual I was faced with the problem that I did not have a particular class/group of learners in mind for whom I was creating this visual. In this instance, however, this was quite liberating as it meant I could experiment with different elements of the process and the technologies needed along the way without having to worry too much about the result. As it turned out, I am not particularly proud of the end product and I doubt it will ever find its way into my classroom (at least not in its current state). I am, however, pleased with the process that got me there.
Before I looked at the preparation sheet for the seminar I had never given infographics much thought, not reflected on how I ‘consume’ them, not used them in class and definitely not thought of designing one myself. So my first stop was the suggested TED talk by David McCandless which I found absolutely fascinating (The beauty of data visualization – David McCandless). It was amazing to watch how facts/data appeared in a completely new light when they were transformed into visual information. However, in the talk infographics were very much about clever design and aesthetics and I felt that in an educational context and with my task the information element might be the one to concentrate on first.

In order to find out more about how infographics can be used for language teaching I therefore turned to Nik Peachy who provides the following useful definition which can also serve as an explanation why it might be good to use them in educational contexts:

An infographic is a visual representation of, what is often, quite dense statistical information. This is the kind of information which can be very difficult to read as prose/text but which, when transformed to a visual, can become accessible very quickly. (Exploiting infographics for ELT – Nik Peachy)

That made me think of another area I have been wanting to explore: corpora research. I thought that information you gather about language from a corpus is very much about numbers and could therefore benefit from being supported visually. I have never used an online corpus for research or in teaching but love the idea of it being about the language of ‘real’ people in ‘real’ life providing data that can be used by students to make their own discoveries about the language they are learning (I realise that this point is controversial as some put forward the argument that this ‘real’ language loses its ‘authentic’ meaning as soon as it is taken out of its original context, but this is not the place to go into detail).

I found phrasesinenglish.org (via the British National Corpus website) and chose the word ‘learn’ – quite a random choice and probably not the most useful but I am really into ‘learning’ at the moment – theory and practice – which seemed as good a reason as any at the time (especially considering that I did not have a real class in mind, i.e. no real teaching point to make). I then asked for any two-word combinations which delivered the following list:

To turn this information into something visual I used the draw.io programme on Nik Peachy’s recommendation (https://www.draw.io/). I went down the list and created bubbles of different sizes, the size relating to the frequency of the combination. I then decided to leave the visual at that, as I thought that in a proper teaching scenario students could find additional information themselves and choose their own examples. That way they might find out that ‘learn to’ and ‘learn how to’ are used in the same way, that both of these are followed by verbs whereas ‘learn from’ is followed by a noun/nouns (e.g. from our mistakes, from their masters) and that the ‘at’ in ‘learn at’ does not really belong to ‘learn’ but to the phrase following which tends to give information about where the learning is taking place (e.g. at school, at college) or how fast (e.g. at his or her own speed, at different rates). For me the important thing was that students, at least in principle, would be free to make their own discoveries which we could then examine together.

The last stage in my learning process was to find out what format this visual would best be saved in (jpeg or gif seem to be the obvious) and where (e.g. Google Drive or One Drive) in order to share it most conveniently with the other people in my study group but also with prospective students.

In summary, although I am not that happy about the infographic created, I feel I have learned a lot in the space of a week and I am confident that the process could be applied to a real teaching scenario. The task also illustrates how proactive I have become with regards to using technology for teaching. It shows that, if even a technophobe like me is able to come up with at least something over the course of a week, then anything is possible! This goes back to what I said in my very first post on this blog: I like to think of teaching as ‘leading by example’. If I want my students to be curious, I need to give them a taste of my own curiosity; if I want them to be comfortable admitting their ignorance, I need to be able to prove to them that not knowing something does not have to be embarrassing; if I want my students to be creative and proactive, I need to give them examples of something I have created.