In the second of our 6 part ‘Cambridge Papers in ELT’ series, we focus on the ways we can help our students achieve effective English. This research paper by Ben Goldstein explores visual literacy in English language teaching. Inspired by the pedagogical and linguistic insights in this white paper, English Language Tutor, Vanessa Pasini, discusses how we can incorporate visual literacy into our classroom.
Visual literacy is the ability to create meaning from images. It involves decoding visuals using our own cultural and personal filters. This doesn’t just apply to static images. We can apply visual literacy to films, websites and social media platforms. In this post I’ll be outlining a few ways we can unlock images and generate learner output. I’ll even be sharing a few ideas from my own classroom!
Why should we incorporate visual literacy into lessons?
Advertisements, packaging, newspapers and online content all constitute visual literacy. What’s more, when you share images on social media, you’re creating your own! Including visual literacy in your lessons is easy. You can use printed images, online images or images in textbooks. If you want to mix things up, you can personalise the experience by encouraging your students to share photos of their own experiences.
You can use the same image for multiple language levels – exploring the same cultural references is a great way to make your students feel confident in their interpretations. It’s fun and it’s a great alternative to using texts to generate conversation.
How can we exploit visual literacy in the language classroom?
Any image (moving or static) can be analysed using 3 questions:
- What do you see?
- How does it make you feel?
- What does it say about society, the context or audience?
There’s a list of 21 questions in the white paper and they go into specific detail – it’s well worth having a read. They work on any photo and are great at guiding your students towards thinking critically and forming their own unique responses.
You can take an image, place it in a different context and make it unfamiliar. Using distorted maps is a good way. Show your students a population density map and ask them how it differs from a normal map. Ask them to justify their responses, without telling them the answer.
Examples of visual literacy in the classroom
Websites like Lessonstream have ready-planned lessons, like this one on Shepard Fairey’s poster: ‘I Am America’.
The NYT’s ‘What’s Going on in This Picture?‘ is a great resource. Every week an image is presented without background information. A few weeks ago, I presented this image of a flock of sheep to my class. My own culture associates sheep with passive followers. This developed into a discussion about the symbolism of animals in imagery and cultural references.
Ask your students to bring in their own advertisement examples. Newspapers, online, and real life photos are great sources. Advertisements are great for analysing intended audiences. You could even get your students to create their own advertisements for a product with a target market in mind.
Recently, I’ve been working with art students and preparing them for university. We spend lots of class time discussing images, paintings and other art forms, where the meaning of the image is the focus. You can easily apply this approach to language classes. Making visual literacy a conscious part of lessons is a great way of encouraging deeper analysis, complex lexis and complex sentence structure. Asking your students to think about the reasons behind their responses encourages them to justify, evaluate and provide evidence for their choices. This makes learning more meaningful and personalised – which is a key part of successful teaching.
If you want to find out more about visual literacy, read the visual literacy white paper that inspired this article!