Visuals and text
People have been using visuals as a communicating tool since Stone age. The power of image has an incredible physiological impact on people. It is used for political, religious, commercial, educational, entertaining purposes. It’s a whole science of using colours, charts, maps, graphs in order to deliver a message.
We are a screen based generation and it has changed the way we think ,accept and digest the information is different from the way our parents used to or our children will.
Years ago teaching material was mainly paper based but now we are ‘blessed’ with technology, which opens up great opportunities to have an instant access to mix semiotic resources.
New technology has introduced the new way of multimodal communication . People can stay physically connected almost anywhere: at work, shops, school and etc. It also has given a quick and easy access to a teacher to use different programs to create images for educational purposes. There are plenty of free programs which can help create visual materials: piktochart, Bubblr for comic strips, storytelling, creating dialogues, Flickr and etc.
It is hard to imagine any educational process without using images, especially in L2 context . With a new technology entering our classrooms , it has become easier for teachers to present material in more vibrant and diverse way. We can google an image if struggling to explain the meaning of the word, especially to low-level students, we use them for activating schemata, eliciting information, they gives us opportunity to cater for our learners needs and learning styles: explaining tense aspects using tense timelines or images, it gives us an opportunity being more creative, use our materials not only for teaching a language, but also make them educational, interesting.
I really like using cartoons from English with Laughter. This book has great images, which I use as a warmer, a lead in or for eliciting and practising the form.
Images can also facilitate introducing a new vocabulary or used as an aid when students struggle to understand the form or how it’s used in the language . Here is one of the examples for practising and comparing Present Perfect and Perfect Continues forms.
Saying all above, we are back to square one, when trying to use visuals in paper-based materials. Especially when writing a coursebook. All tonnes of images and programs suddenly become restricted due to publishing rights and regulations, using cartoons becomes unaffordable as usually big publishers try to cut down on a cost of material designing. As a result, images used in coursebook don’t often meet their purposes: facilitating learning, promoting language, helping build an association with vocabulary or grammar point and quite often used as decoration or a gap filler(the main function of visuals in coursebooks is purely decorative (Hill 2013: 161), and when images are actually exploited, they are generally used for low-level language activities (p. 162).
After looking through ‘Cutting Edge’ upper intermediate Unit 3, I found only 20% of images help a learner to activate schemata or help understanding grammar.
| Picture type | ||
| Colour photos | 8 | |
| place | 1 | |
| Colour drawings | 16 | |
| B &W drawings | 2 | |
| interaction | 6 | |
| action | 11 | |
| portrait | 2 |
The activity of using pictures on p. 32-33 are very unclear, it’s had to come up with a story by looking at those pictures as they don’t tell much and they took two pages.
It’s very easy to criticise somebody’s work but you do fill how hard and time-consuming it can be when you want to use an image not for decorating but for being used in an activity. It’s not very hard to use images for matching written text or vocabulary with a picture, giving a physical description, spotting differences and so on. There are so many moments when I wish I could draw when explaining grammar points as not all students like timelines and benefit from visualising the situation, for story telling or when I need a particular facial expression or a situation. Images can make the process of learning easy, exciting, educational, engaging when correctly selected.
Also, after our discussions at our seminars, I started to think how fully exploited the emotional aspect of visuals,“visual materials have an emotional impact”. As Keddie (2009: 5) . Images have a strong emotional impact on us, they provoke thinking, curiosity, bring back memories and remind us of the experiences we’ve had.
The beginning of this summer was rather wet, and usually, the learners, who come to England have had a flavour of English weather and when I showed this image as a warmer for the lesson, we were covering ‘The weather’ topic, it literally spoke for itself. It helped with eliciting vocabulary, talking about the weather in England, the learners compared it to the weather in their countries, even took an image of this picture and posted it on a Facebook. 
The other time, I tried to use controversial images. We were working on the topic ‘Inventions’ and I decided to speak about chindogu inventions, which are silly and funny.
First, students had to come up with the list of 10 inventions, which have changed our lives.
Then, the learners had to compare their answers and talk about which inventions are positive and negative.
For the next stage, I gave out different images of chindogu inventions and the students had to discuss what are they for and how useful they are. These images sparked a lot of interest and facilitate the discussion and gave an opportunity to revise the previous vocabulary we had learnt( ridiculous, hilarious and etc.).
After that, the learners were giving a cutout lists with the description matching those images.
At the final stage, learners came up with a wish to draw their own inventions;
In the examples above, I used the pictures to “talk about” them rather than “talk with” them. I came across these concepts while reading Corder (1966: 35, cited in Hill 2013: 165). When students talk about the picture, they only describe what they see. However, when ‘talking with the picture’, learners use the image as a springboard to speak about personal experiences or about things that they think or deduce. An example of this difference can be found in Keddie’s activity “What were you doing?” (2009: 71).
Here is one more example of an activity using visuals is ‘Roads’, proposed by Hill (1990: 34, cited in Hill 2013: 162), in which images are simply used as empty canvasses for students to paint with their imagination.
I used this activity as a pre-last stage for learning phrasal verbs. Phrasal verbs are easy to forget or confuse, so I decided to add an emotional factor to it. The learners had to draw the images and as a final stage, we played a game: ‘Slap the desk'(it’s an active , dynamic game and work brilliantly for acquiring or brushing up a new vocabulary) using their images. The learners loved the game and the idea making them pictures those phrasal verbs helped them remembering them and also we used those images time to time as a revision or as a break.
There is one more activity I used, inspired by an example of Keddie’s activity “What were you doing?” (2009: 71).
Students were asked to identify those places, we spoke if they would like to visit them and why, the students who have been to those places shared their experience and the emotions, we talked about the legends and myths behind those images.
Bibliography
Walker, A. & White, G. (2013) Technology Enhanced Language Learning: Connecting theory and practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hill, D. A. (2013) The visual element in EFL coursebooks. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed)Developing Materials for Language Teaching. (2nd ed) London: Bloomsbury. pp. 157-166.
Keddie, J. (2009) Images. Oxford: Oxford University.
Hill, D. A. (1990) Visual Impact. Harlow: Longman.