A few days ago, a snowstorm hit my hometown and my friend sent me 2 pictures of her garden with a written message “see how heavy the snow is. The one below was taken 24 hours later than that above”.  Suppose that without the pictures, how difficult it would be for me to interpret the “heavy snow”. This just reminded me of a Chinese old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. And vice versa, without the text, I would never know such heavy snowfalls took place in 24 hours. In this case, the text rescued the image by avoiding ambiguity or distinct interpretation and the picture gives the information of “heavy”, which can only be provided by the image.

Current situation

As for language learning, it is rare to find no visuals in language materials especially course books. Visuals can be photos, illustrations, cartoons and diagrams etc. Here comes the question why visuals become an integral part of most of the materials. The research was conducted by Hill (2013) to examine what use is being made of the pictorial material with regard to British course books and the finding shows that 55% of all illustrations are merely decorative and space-filling. Obviously, the “ornamentation” that Harmer (2001) terms these pictures can appeal to learners. However, there is a moot point whether the strong appeal can translate to language learning benefits. If yes, how?

The power of visuals

As Dubois and Vial (2000) put, the more educational materials promote connections between the two methods of coding (visual and verbal), the more learning takes place. In other words, images which have the same message as the words can illustrate an interactive situation with the target language, which allows more effective learning and memorization by building redundancy into a multimodal message and thus benefits students of visual learning style. Besides, visuals can bring the real world into the classroom and the genuine audience to communicate with, generating emotional impact and creating a void which needs to be filled with language. Nevertheless, Sless (1981) points out the absence of guidance on choices of visual material makes it challenging to know what specific educational value illustrations in texts may have although there is no shortage of illustrated texts at all levels. Since visuals do have benefits for language learning, such guidance or principles need developing to evaluate the effectiveness of the use of visuals.

Evaluation of the use of visuals in course books

Based on Duchastel’s taxonomy (1978) and Hill’s research (2013), my colleague Bader and I developed our criteria of assessing visuals in texts (see the picture below) and evaluated some visuals used in Face2face.

Duchstel’s taxonomy identifies the purposes of using visuals as follows:

1. affective: provided to enhance interest and motivation;
2. attentive: intended to attract and direct attention;
3. didactic: intended to facilitate learning by showing something difficult to convey in words;
4. supportive: provided for less able learners
5. retentional: provided to facilitate memorisation.

We decided to assess the effectiveness in terms of the link to the target language, integrity to an activity or task and the possibility of distracting the learners. We also considered the other aspects of improving the use of visuals.

Then I evaluated a section of Face2face 3A p28, which is about listening and vocabulary. The 2 photo of real humans can meet learners’ expectations by catching their eye. However, these visuals have nothing to do with the target language and the tasks, which is more decorative than effective to facilitate learning. Moreover, both of the women wear in red, which is appreciated in Chinese culture but I am not sure if it is a taboo in other culture. Then I moved to the cartoons which are designed to illustrate the meaning of the vocabulary in a task of matching the words with each cartoon. The body language, dressing and setting help convey the meaning and generate dual-coding in mind, which is highly likely to produce redundancy and facilitate memorization. However, to make the most of the pedagogical value of these cartoons, the tasks can be modified to talk with the picture in groups so as to illustrate an interactive situation with the target language and allow differentiation and create more learning opportunities.

Reflection

This seminar evoked my memory of the demo lessons given in teaching competitions in my context, where the use of PowerPoint is graded and I never saw a slide with no visuals. In retrospect, most of the visuals are used by teachers to impress the judges and students with ‘Wow’ effects. These visuals even videos act as being more attention-catching than being relevant to language learning.  In fact, it is the lack of understanding of how visuals enhance language learning that leads to the misuse of visuals in most cases.This reveals the importance of elaborating on material evaluation in teacher education and how learners benefit from developing visual literacy to enhance language learning.  All in all, it is the effective design of the task with visuals incorporated as facilitation that maximizes the educational value of visuals.

References:

Dubois, M. & Vial, I. 2000, “Multimedia design: the effects of relating multimodal information”, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 157-165.

Duchastel, P. C. (1978) Illustrating instructional texts. Educational Technology18 36-39.

Harmer, J. 2001 The Practice of English Language Teaching. Harlow: Longman.

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.

Sless, D. (1981) Learning and Visual Communication. London: Halsted Press.