Energy of visual and verbal modalities in language education

Abstract

Pictures, like words are omnipresent in our lives. Each form of communication carries visible (clear) and invisible (hidden) messages. This paper will describe the research conducted during a workshop about visual and verbal input in language education. The workshop was addressed to students and teachers who participate in children’s language education. A focus was on the sociocultural context of learning and visual literacy as essential skills for reading multimodal texts and transferring information in the 21st century. There were two questions stated: What is the role of verbal and visual modalities in language education? What is the image-text relationship in transferring information? The qualitative, sociocultural and MDA approaches were applied to raise participant’s awareness of image-text intermodality. The idea was also to practise selection and evaluation of ELT materials. The paper hopes to increase the role of visual methodology and multimodal perspective in language education.