Integrating Visual Literacy in Language Learning
In this article, Baker (2015) argued why visual literacy should be integrated with language study and suggested four instructional strategies to use visual media as an effective tool to sharpen both language skills and visual literacy skills. After reviewing several existent literature in the field, the author defined the term visual literacy as “the competency to make meaning from what we see and to create images that convey implicit and explicit messages to others” (Baker, 2015). In order to support for the claim that visual literacy cultivates language learning, Baker provided five major benefits of incorporating images in lesson which are encouraging conversation among students, honing students’ critical thinking skills, expanding students’ perspective to worldwide level, providing supporting tool for student to learn new vocabularies or sentence structures, and connecting language to lesson content.
Baker spent the rest of the article to introduce four instructional strategies for applying visual literacy into language learning. The first one is “Photo Analysis” (Baker, 2015) in which each group of students is assigned one separate part of the picture and students are asked to observe and describe what they see in their part with other groups. In the second strategy called “Mystery Photo” (Baker, 2015), students are urged to use descriptive language to guess what the obscured picture delineates. The third strategy named “Collaborative Stories” requires a group of students making up and telling a story based on the three different images that they are provided. The last but not least strategy called “Selfies” is concerned with narrating stories behind students’ selfies.
Before concluding the article, the author introduced some sources of visual materials that teachers can utilize to design visual literacy activities for their language lessons. Finally, the author re-emphasized the integral role of images in our daily lives and encouraged other educators to not only enhance their own observation skills, but also leverage images to extend students’ language abilities.
Reference:
Baker, L. (2015). How many words is a picture worth? Integrating visual literacy in language learning with photographs. English Teaching Forum, 53(4), 2-13.
