Visual Literacy and Its Impact on Teaching and Learning

Chapter Abstract This chapter proposes an educational definition of visual literacy for the early grades. Currently, beginning literacy instruction is far too print-centric, with limited pragmatic use in a highly visual and image-based world. At the same time, "visual literacy" as a field of thought crosses many disciplines: art history, mass media, information technologies, semiotics, philosophy, and so on. While all of these disciplines are highly educational at their roots, teaching reading and writing to young children may not need to delve too deeply into any one of these categories for us to understand how to read an image. Meanwhile, linguistic print itself can take on visual modes (e.g., color, size, slant, shape, etc.), which portends meaning beyond the phoneme-grapheme connection, and which also means we can't throw out linguistic print altogether. Print, after all, is still visual, and is still a form of social semiotics; it just needs to be put in perspecti...

The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece has provided a curriculum for the post-graduate programme titled Italian Language and Culture. Our contribution to this curriculum was an innovative course titled Visual Literacy in Language Teaching and Learning for students specializing in Applied Linguistics. We have followed the "new pedagogies of multiliteracies" 1 , shifting from the dominant print text and examining how literacy can be practised when analysing video, as a new form of multimodal text, in the new millennium. By employing this new concept of pedagogy, we aim to introduce a framework consisting of two elements, a systemic functional (SF) approach and multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), to describe the activities of individuals as they identify, read and create new texts using various semiotic codes. This approach to literacy was introduced in a university setting in response to the call for higher education to adopt a strong commitment to a socially pertinent visual literacy 2 .

The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece has provided a curriculum for the post-graduate programme titled ‘Italian Language and Culture’. We have contributed to this curriculum by designing an innovative course titled Visual Literacy in Language Teaching and Learning for the students that have chosen the specialization ‘Applied Linguistics’. We have followed the ‘new pedagogies of multiliteracies’ to shift from the dominant print text and examine how literacy can be practised when analysing video, as a new form of multimodal text, in the new millennium. By employing this new concept of pedagogy, we aim to introduce a framework consisting of two elements, a systemic functional (SF) approach and multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) to describe the activities of individuals as they identify, read and create new texts using a variety of semiotic codes. The reason for introducing this approach to literacy in a university setting was a response to the call for higher education to adopt a strong commitment to visual literacy that would be socially pertinent.

My goals in this article are to discuss the area of visual literacy and summarize the talk presented at the XVI Convention of English Teachers realized by APLIEMT -The Association of English Teachers of Mato Grosso, in 2013. In the first part of the article, I investigate three key concepts that influence the education of foreign/additional secondary languages: globalization, the roles of English and new technologies. In the second part, I discuss the area of visual literacy. Finally, I refer to some activities as examples of visual literacy.

2014

Visually literate persons are able to understand, to create and to use images as a means of expression and communication. Understanding the elements, the meanings, and the natures of visual images may lead visually literate persons to be able to use the images for the purpose of teaching English. Integrating the visual images in the steps of teaching learning process may create better learning atmosphere that trigger the students' higher achievement. This paper is aimed to elaborate the nature of visual literacy and the integration of visual literacy component in teaching English.

This book is an edited volume, with contributions by Barbara Stafford, W.J.T. Mitchell, Jon Simons, Jonathan Crary, and others. It was the product of a combined conference and exhibition of the same name, which has generated another book, "Visual Practices Across the University" (which is uploaded, in its entirety, on this site) and "Visual Cultures" (not yet published). "Visual Literacy" is intended to survey the meanings of the expression, and related notions such as visual competence. Some contributors are interested in the theory of literacy when it pertains to the visual; others in its rhetoric; and others in its implementation at college and secondary school level. The book is intended to serve as a resource for conversations about what comprises minimal or desirable visual ability, competence, or literacy in a university or secondary-school setting. This text is the introduction, the only part of the book I wrote--and so the only part I will upload here.

The inclusion of visual images in current educational literacy discussions tends to contextualise them within more semiotic, socio-critical and textually focussed theoretical traditions. These particular traditions privilege and emphasise the structures and "language-like" aspects of visual images, and include the broader social and cultural structural frames, such as gender and class, as well as the specific codes and "grammars" of individual images. While there are strong benefits in employing these approaches, the nature of visual images themselves may require a broader, interdisciplinary approach. This paper will include discussion of the field of visual culture in general, the unique nature of images, the role of philosophy in regard to image, the inclusion of the individual's hermeneutic role in meaning-making, and the attendant educational implications when applying such work to contemporary educational literacy practice.

RFI Publication, 2021

Learning has always been a fundamental characteristic of human species. Human civilization has evolved and touched the heights of great advancement while learning about the occurrences in his environment. The desire to communicate his learnt lessons has been one of the prominent reasons of the origin of the languages. From cave paintings to early scripts, we can see that the human mind had a strong inclination to learn through the medium of visuals. With changing times and better tools, man has equipped himself to communicate at all levels in an engrossing manner by incorporating the visuals so to enhance the message and to bridge the semantic gaps. Thus this paper is an attempt where the authors would try to bring out the role of visuals in the pursuit of learning. This paper would also try to highlight the novel visual techniques which are blended in the teaching strategies so as to improvise upon the learning barriers and further add more value to the literary analysis and comprehension.