2

Visuals and Texts

When I made my teacher-made handouts for an English class, I put some pictures or illustrations on them, which were for either only decoration, relating to a task to some extent or a task itself. The main reason I used the pictures and illustrations on my handouts was to attract students to them by entertaining visually. However, the preparation for the seminar made me realise how visual effects have a great potential more than just attracting language learners. Therefore, I need to exploit the photos and illustrations more effectively and take into consideration whether they are used to be affective, attentive, didactic, supportive and retentional.

In this post, I will talk about an infographic, the role of visual and digital literacy.

For the week 5’s seminar preparation, I worked to create the infographic with Emma and Cristiano.

(Please click the image to view)

What is an infographic?

Usefulness of an infographic for ELT

These ideas are cited from Nik Peachey’s blog. (Link here)

How can we use an infographic in the classroom?

These ideas are cited from Nik Peachey’s blog. (Link here and here)

I found an infographic useful and beneficial for Japanese students to foster critical thinking skills. This is because fact findings, checking sources and corroborating information could allow students to think information on the infographic critically and validate it exploring sources. Generally speaking, most of them are passive learners and seem to think that teachers are the ones who take all responsibility for the outcome of learning English. On the other hand, teachers may also supply too much information and fewer instructions of checking sources and corroborating information, which could take an opportunity to think critically away from students. They need to develop critical thinking skills in order to take responsibility for learning English and judge whether information would be validated in the information overload society nowadays.

What the most fascinating thing about an infographic is that students can make their own infographics based on their research. This is a vital to foster their digital literacy. Like Nik Peachey suggests, Picktchart and Draw.io are very useful tools to create an infographic. Our group used Piktchart for making our infographic. Even though it took us 2 hours to make ours for the first time, it was easy and simple. Once you are used to using the tool, it would be fast. Both tools are also free! (but Picktchart, it charges you for some templates, but still free templates are good quality).

Use of our infographic

The aim of our infographic was to develop students’ data interpretation, writing, speaking and presentation skills. They can take these procedures in general, and as teachers, we can change the procedures and tasks according to students’ needs and classroom situation. In terms of presentation, students can present what they experienced in the place of photos. This is talk with photos, not talk about photos, and encourage them to speak their real life in English, which is the idea stressed by Hill (2013).

After our group created our infographic, I realised that the visual images (two people　shape) indicating each city’s population are simple, yet easy to understand. The numbers of population in texts also aids comprehension and provides information in detail. This way of using images and texts on the ELT materials could be very meaningful and essential. On the other hand, most of the time, images are not likely to be used for meaningful purposes. As in Hill (2013)’s research, “a majority of pictures included (in coursebooks) are used only for decorative purposes, and that those used for language purposes tend to concentrate on low-level language skills related to basic language manipulation” (2013: 165). This should be improved and change to using images more meaningful ways in order to help students involve the language learning experience.

The role of visuals in learning language

Like infographics, visual materials in ELT have various roles. I have picked 5 roles of visuals from Walker and White (2013) that I personally found more important.

• Images and video five information that can only be provided visually
• Images and video allow learners to see a context, body language, facial expressions, and artefacts. This provides learners with the opportunity to learn about other cultures and also to ‘hook into’ global culture.
• Images and video bring the real world into the classroom (Goldstein 2008 cited in Walker and White, 2013)
• Images and video cater for students who have a more ‘visual’ learning style
• Images and video provide a quick and economical means of conveying a message; as the adage says, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’.

Digital literacy and visual literacy

Students nowadays are surrounded by a variety of digital texts and it is not unusual thing for them to use social networking services in their every day lives (Walker and White, 2013). Hence, the demand of digital literacy amongst young students has increased. Walker and White point out the importance of teaching visual literacy, and stress that teachers will need to help “students to critically analyse these (digital) texts and to produce ones which communicate meaning effectively and appropriately in a social domain” (2013: 85). Therefore, how to exploit images in ELT plays a crucial role in fostering students’ digital and visual literacy.

Manami

References

Early, M., Kendrick, M., & Potts, D. (2015). Multimodality: Out From the Margins of English Language Teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 49(3), 447–460.

Hill, D. A. (2013). The visual element in EFL coursebooks. In B. Tomlinson (Ed.), Developing materials for language teaching (Second edition., Vol. 2nd ed., pp. 174–182). London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Peachey, ©. N. (n.d.-a). Nik’s Learning Technology Blog: 9 Generic activities for exploiting infographics. Retrieved from http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/2016/01/9-generic-activities-for-exploiting.html

Peachey, ©. N. (n.d.-b). Nik’s Learning Technology Blog: Creating illustrations and infographics for ELT tasks. Retrieved from http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/2015/10/creating-illustrations-and-infographics.html

Peachey, ©. N. (n.d.-c). Nik’s QuickShout: Exploiting Infographics for ELT. Retrieved from http://quickshout.blogspot.com/2013/04/exploiting-infographics-for-elt.html

Walker, A., & White, G. (2013). Technology enhanced language learning: connecting theory and practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.