The power of visuals
Week five was one of the most interesting ones. The session was about visuals and I feel I can relate a lot to this. I believe myself to be more of a visual learner, and I still remember our SLA session with Simon last year, when we did a quiz to find out what kind if learners we are. You can imagine what my result was! Even though we concluded that no one is just one type or learner, I still find visuals stimulating and that they can generate long discussions and interesting lessons.
Our session started with Paul showing us different pictures and asking us to talk about how we interpreted what we saw. It is amazing how people perceive things they see so differently from one another and how each one of us responds to different pictures. It is obvious that when someone creates a picture, they have got a particular idea in the back of their minds, but it is even more fascinating to see how other people interpret them or what some people see that others may have failed to notice. That made me realise how many things we could do with a simple visual in our classes. How many conversations and class discussions we could have with our students, along with vocabulary that could be taught, which could then lead to a reading or writing exercise!
What we can do with visuals also made me think of the reading I did before getting to class. I read Hill’s ‘The Visual Elements in EFL Coursebooks’ and I agree with a lot of the points he makes. Talking about how visuals are used in course books, and after conducting a research, Hill concludes that ‘…the ELT publishers, editors and authors think that it is more or as important to provide attractive space-filling accompanying illustrations in their course books than it is to provide pictures with related activities’. (Hill, 2013). I totally agree with this observation as I have used many books in the past where activities were accompanied by visuals only to make them look more appealing instead of relating to the activity directly.
Another point mentioned in Hill’s book that caught my attention was that of Pit Corder’s distinction between ‘talking about’ a picture and ‘talking with’ a picture (Pit Corder, 1966). I found this part of the reading very interesting as this is a skill I actually try to teach my FCE students. In part 2 of their speaking exam they have to compare and contrast pictures and move away from merely describing what they see. They have to relate what they see to what they know and, therefore, ‘bring their own reality to the lesson’ (Hill, 2013). An example I usually give them to help them develop this particular skill is that of visiting an art gallery with a friend, looking at famous paintings together and then having a conversation about ‘what’ they saw and ‘how’ they would interpret what they saw. People’s descriptions of what is shown in a picture might be similar but the feelings and thoughts a picture can generate may differ from person to person. Therefore, pictures and visuals in ELT materials could be used to stimulate students’ critical thinking rather than simply make a book look more attractive.
Another interesting part of this session was when Paul asked us to describe how we would teach the ‘Present Perfect’ aspect and how we would make it visually engaging. The first thing that came to mind was the use of timelines and retrospective eyes. By simply drawing an eye on the board we could refer to the present and past and many different uses of the present perfect could be elicited and taught. How fascinating! Just by drawing a simple eye on the board!
Personally, I love using visuals in class. Every time I get the chance to do so, I ask my students to refer to photos: sometimes to get the main idea of a text, to generate discussions about various topics and to make grammar more fun. Another thing I’ve learnt through teaching is that you don’t have to be great at drawing to use visuals in class. You can always ask your students to do the work! One of my favourite lessons to teach, for example, is reported speech because I get to to see my students create their own comic stories. I love that! It’s their time to be creative and I take advantage of it to take a step back and just monitor their work. Below are some pictures I took last summer when we did reported speech with my upper-intermediate class. After discussing how to report other people’s words, the students were given a text in reported speech and they had to change it into direct speech by following the story events and creating their own visual version of it.
Reported speech, as my students’ feedback has shown so far, is quite a ‘difficult’ and ‘demanding’ grammatical point. Students need to memorise rules related to changes from direct into indirect speech as well as a number of reporting verbs which follow various structures, so every time reported speech appears in a text book my first thought is that I don’t want to bore my students with endless lists of rules. Why not draw then and learn while having fun? Most of the time my students’ first reaction when I mention drawing goes like that: ‘Oh no! My drawing is terrible!’, to which I reply: ‘It can’t be worse than mine!’. The last time I used this activity in class the initial reactions were exactly the same until the students got down to it. While monitoring, I noticed giggles, students trying their best to create nice drawings, co-operation and people advising each other as well as a positive attitude towards a grammatical topic they usually frown upon. A close look at the pictures below and one can see that their response to the task was actually impressive. The changes from indirect to direct speech were grammatically correct and, at the same time, the students seemed to enjoy the activity. Killing two birds with one stone, I’d definitely say yes to that!
Reflecting on what I did in class one year ago and having had a session on visuals on the Diploma course I can now see how I could take this whole lesson a bit further. Comics could generate story writing; students could delete the speech bubbles, look at the drawings or create new ones, exchange them with their partners’ drawings and write a story using narrative tenses based on the pictures they see. Another idea would be to use the dialogues in a comic story to do some role-playing which would mean speaking practice, and which could then lead to pronunciation, sentence stress or intonation. Finally, this could also be an interesting class for students who struggle with spelling and punctuation. The use of enjoyable and interactive activities such as comics could help students make small steps towards better literacy skills. Not to mention the amount of vocabulary related to feelings that could be taught simply by looking at facial expressions within a comic story. I can’t believe how many things I can see now that I couldn’t see before!
Don’t we all love visuals! 🙂
References
Hill, D. A. (2013). ‘The Visual Elements in EFL Coursebooks’ in Brian Tomlinson Developing Materials for Language Teaching. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Pit Corder, S. (1966). The Visual Element in Language Teaching. London: Longman.
Paul Slater
I found it interesting to see the qualitative jump between the earlier sections of this week 5 post and the one in week 4. You seem more engaged and are picking out specific issues from your reading and from points made in the seminar to start getting your teeth into. The points you choose to discuss are ones which merit attention. Try an experiment by getting your native-speaker friends to do the type of activities that non-native speakers are expected to do with FCE images. The results are very interesting.
You talk about being a ‘visual learner’, do you think that anyone with normal vision isn’t a visual learner?
After a really good opening half this post loses momentum. You post up some lovely visuals from an activity you did in class but don’t provide much information on what you did, why, how the learners responded, how you could take it further, etc. In the opening to this post you say that this session was one you really enjoyed, so this is a post to really develop to show what you are capable of. You’re not expected to do this every week but there should be some posts where the subject interests you sufficiently that you really show what you can do when something engages you.
Do proofread your posts as there are a few minor language slips and typos.
– Paul
Constantine Kourakis
I, too, consider myself a visual learner. The power of visuals and their potential in the EFL classroom are fascinating. It’s no surprise that the coursebooks have moved a long way from the scarce black-and-white drawings to the abundance of illustrations nowadays showing that publishers and authors embrace their central role.
Since you mentioned using visuals for grammar and language output, I think that Visual Grammar by Scrivener would be a useful and interesting resource for you. Have a look at it!
As for the timelines, what I find that really works in higher-level classes, especially when it comes to review of tenses/aspects, is getting the students to draw the timelines themselves. That way you can see how the students visualise the grammatical features.
And then of course, there are also the students’ photo albums on their phones which provide great opportunities for authentic language production.
Eleni Bampali
Thanks for your comment, Constantine. What you say is really useful. I will have a look at the book you mentioned. What you say about timelines and getting students to draw them is really important as well. I remember discussing this with you when you did a peer observation on me. It is a very interesting observation and I agree with you that it could work well with higher level classes when reviewing tenses/aspects.
I’m glad to hear you like using visuals in your lessons too. Have you ever tried ‘caption competition’? I tried it the other day with my upper-intermediate class while doing grammar. I found some funny/strange photos on the Net and the students had to write captions to describe the pictures using the structures ‘so..that’ and ‘such…that’, which was the grammar point being taught on the day. In the end, we did peer feedback with the whole class, corrected errors and students voted for the best captions. It was quite enjoyable to see what they had come up with! And I guess you could adapt this activity and use it for any grammatical point you like.
Emily Hall
I love this idea for a lesson!
I know that Constantine has already commented on this post and in fact also gave me some tips on how to become more confident with visuals in class. But I felt like I needed to comment on this one too. In particular, because I did reported speech this week with CAE. We did the reporting verbs and different structures that they follow. We discussed as a class how it’s not an exciting topic and can be really tedious. I can completely empathise with the students’ concerns about drawing and was pleased to hear that the students were giggling about their drawings and ended up not caring what everyone thought! This is the mindset I need to take!
I also like where you pointed out Pit Corder’s dinstinction between ‘talking about’ a picture and ‘talking with’ a picture. This is very relevant for our contexts and could be an important distinction to point out to students. It could be valuable to discuss with them what the difference is and ways we can do the latter. Critical thinking is definitely a skill that I have noticed a lot of exam students lack. Their language ability can be excellent but they lack ideas and therefore content of speaking part 2. I have come to the realisation lately that we are not there to simply provide language, but also to open up discussions, get students to think critically and just to have ideas about a broad range of topics.