Visual Literacy and Its Impact on Teaching and Learning (original) (raw)
Visual Language, Visual Literacy: Education à la Modes
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 Development of A Visual Literacy Course in Higher Education.
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.
Visual Literacy: the interpretation of images in English Classes
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.
How Can Visual Literacy Support English Language Teaching
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.
Literacy and the visual: Broadening our vision
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.
Visual Language as Complement to Literary Comprehension and Analysis
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.
Critical visual literacy: the new phase of applied linguistics in the era of mobile technology
I n our society, which is full of images, visual representations and visual experiences of all kinds, there is a paradoxically significant degree of visual illiteracy. Despite the importance of developing specific visual skills, visual literacy is not a priority in school curriculum (Spalter & van Dam, 2008). This work aims at (1) emphasising the importance of integrating visual literacy as the fifth linguistic skill in English classes, and (2) showing a visual activity exploring a video called Price Tag. We will show some strategies that can be applied in foreign language classes in order to teach students a way to encode and decode the artifacts of their own culture and perceive the affordances of multimodal composition. In this research, the students' cell phones were used with which we developed activities using videos as multimodal texts.
Visual Literacy for the 21ST Century
IJAEDU- International E-Journal of Advances in Education
The dominance of the pictorial world forms the beginning of the effect of new visual civilisation in the 21st century. Today, we already know that photograph, film and television are just fist stage of visual era. The modern phenomena of digitalisation and mass communication related to the development of information and communication technologies and Internet, dramatically saturate the pictures and pictorial messages to public space and thus also to our everyday life. Posters, billboards and various visual posts attack us every day with their pictorial messages, trying to influence us while going to the work or school as well as while being on the road for a joy or relax. The presence of visual impulses is perceived also in the public space, for example in shopping malls. In such an environment, their role is to affect our purchasing habits. The information lettering in pictorial form-iconograms-orientate us on the streets, at the stations of mass transport, at the airports, in shopping malls, in tourism regions. Today, Internet and social networks are mainly the source of information mediated in the form of pictures in multimedia form. In the contemporary world, heavily saturated with pictures and media, our view of what literacy means must be extended, or even redefined. To read pictures is more than to read and write text, this is the "reading of the world of pictures". The Kaiser Family Foundation Study implies young people devote still greater attention to the pictures in the new media (Internet and social networks). While this was six hours and twenty-one minutes a day in average in 2009, it is seven hours and thirty-eight minutes a day in 2013. The numerical data say there has been a significant shift for 4 years and young people pay greater attention to pictorial information, they devote more of their time to them, by one hour and seventeen minutes. We may state that the use of new media has been intensified for recent 10 years, thus also time capacity devoted to media by young people has been increased too, save one exceptionthe interest in reading has decreased, yet it still consider it to be the basic, non-excludable literacy. Saying it in more unambiguously, text reading gets to the background and the first place is attained by reading, or perception of pictures in digital media. In the article we present a theoretical model of visual literacy and develop new personnel competencies of children for the 21st century, such as visual perception, visual thinking, visual language and learning visual literacy.
The Importance of Visual Language in Learning Photography
2014
The development in camera technology seems to grow so fast, and so does the computer. It should improve the creativity of the practitioners so that the issues arising are not in the aspects of technique and the sophisticated tools only -but are in the content represented, so that the "photography art" would not be stagnant. This photography stagnation can be figured out by the appearance of most photo-works, image repetition especially in the naturalist style. The implication of digital camera revolution is in making camera operating easier. Therefore, even a six-year-old kid can compose a photo-work defined as good by the practitioners and photographer. Although it is good that taking photographs has become easier, it seems that content is not an important aspect. One of the elements in photography hardly touched is visual language. It seems to be unimportant in photography area and works. This paradigm does not belong to the photographers but also to the photography subject educators, where as in photography area it cannot be separated due to the picture produced is a result of visual grammar. Thus it is very necessary in learning photography, either the Western which has been globalized since the colonialism era or the special one come from the Indonesia tradition.
Reading image and thinking image in a new visual age
We are living in the age in which visually is prevailing intensely and mass communication is based upon image rather than expression. It is a significant skill for our age to comprehend the language of images in this new visual age. Art and visual world are not independent concepts. Visual literacy, a branch of multiple literacies emerged with the development of information and its transfer style, is a visual language utilized to work out issues of this new visual age. In this study, the relation of visual literacy concept to art and art education is investigated based on the literature in the light of technological advancements. Improvability of visual literacy skills through art education is discussed by compiling the results and comments of other studies and investigating the interrelation of art and visual literacy. At the end of the research with the scanning method, evaluations on the relations of visual literacy concept to art education and their interactive sides were carried out, and conclusions and recommendations were stated relevant to raise productive individuals that have visual literacy skills through an effective art education.
The presence of visual elements in today’s teaching and learning is increasing as the integration of images and visual presentations with text in textbooks, instructional manuals, classroom presentations, and computer interfaces broadens. Research reported in educational literature demonstrates that using visuals in teaching results in greater degree of learning. The basic premise of this body of research is the concept of visual literacy, introducing visual literacy and stratagems to teach it in secondary schools.
Commonality Between Verbal and Visual Language
2020
Islamic architecture is one of the most The term Visual Language is commonly used in the field of art and design to describe a form of communication that uses visual elements and/or symbols as opposed to formal written language to convey a meaning or an idea. The notion of visual language constantly represents one of the author major concerns, what does it mean and how to be understood, how to study and grasp its structure and grammar, what are the basic elements of this language and how it is used as a powerful method of expressing our emotions and our understanding of the world around us in a different way of communication. As a teacher and a practitioner of art and design, the author concern about visual language led him to investigate the relevance between visual language and verbal language suggesting that both languages have similar and common structures that would enable art and design students to understand the visual language more accurately in accordance to their understanding of the verbal one by applying the same structural concepts. This investigation, which took more than 10 years of research, practice and experimental teaching, resulted in developing a methodology that could implement the communality aspects between visual and verbal language in teaching art and design in the academic arena. This paper endeavours to address the advantages of using the visual language structural potentials in relation to the verbal language as a suggested methodology in teaching 2D design for the foundational stages in art and design institutions. The paper also showcases and analyses some students' works that demonstrate how they applied their understanding of visual language suggested methodology in developing their 2D designing skills.