masterThesis
The Teaching of Visual Literacy in Initial English Language Teacher Education
Fecha
2020Autor
Cad, Ana Cecilia
Institución
Resumen
The pressure on teacher education to prepare student teachers to bridge the gap between
the traditional literacy and multiliteracies/multimodality has intensified in the last years.
Student teachers need to acquire richer and more complex learning experiences, they
need to be aware that language is not the only or, sometimes, the predominant mode of
communication (Early, Kendrick & Potts, 2015). Thus, this study attempts to integrate
the teaching of visual literacy within an Initial English Language Teacher Education
(IELTE) programme to help expand student teachers communicative potential in the
foreign language classroom. Currently, student teachers ́ literacy instruction favors the
interpretation of the verbal mode; however, to promote literacy skills in this century,
literacy programmes should promote the reading and the understanding of meaning
making signs of both the verbal and visual mode and their relationship with the structural
components of a narrative text (Painter, 2012). In the Argentinian context, there are
studies that explore the teaching of visual literacy to student teachers ́ but none of the
works focuses on the teaching of visual literacy within an IELTE programme. This study
will explore how the explicit teaching of visual literacy can enhance student-teachers ́
communication skills in the second language. This case study involves twelve student
teachers from the third year of an IELTE programme, a teacher observer and the
researcher herself. To triangulate data, different data collecting tools were employed: a)
pretest and posttest; b) classroom observation; c) document analysis, and d) interviews
to students. The analysis of the data was of an interpretative nature supported by
statistical data. Research findings, pedagogical implications and suggestions for further
research are presented in the last chapters.