Current educational systems primarily focus on the verbal and logicomathematical aptitude of students, thus neglecting the cultivation of visual literacy and critical literacy skills, although the ubiquity of images in school textbooks necessitates the inclusion of a 'visual grammar' meta-language in educational practices. The aim of the present paper is to present a teaching intervention for the teaching of literacy in English through the implementation of critical multimodal literacy principles in order to bridge the gap between schooled literacy and out-of-school literacies. The participants in the intervention are eighteen sixth grade students of an EFL classroom in a state primary school in Thessaloniki who managed to 'deconstruct' the depiction of superheroes/heroines in comic books or action movies, in an effort to represent them in a more humane and mundane way, where their superpowers are summoned to the advantage of a society in need. The overall organization of the instructional intervention is built on an introductory phase, a main phase and a follow-up phase. The analysis of the students' compositions relies on the application of the principles of critical visual literacy and the results display that, through the process of scaffolding, the students can reject dominant representations of power and reconstruct cliché identities by re-exploring preexisting roles. The end result, that is the classroom calendar compiled by twelve multimodal texts, manifests the students' skilful utilization of both visual and verbal semiotic resources in a balanced way, with a view to transmitting their social messages taking into account the broader social, cultural and political context within which power relations and social roles constantly evolve and are constructed.
Given that little research has been conducted to date in the classroom about the exploitation of aspects of "visual grammar" for the teaching of literacy, the purpose of this study is to provide research data to support the adoption of a common image/text relations metalanguage in educational practice as an effective tool for critically negotiating, and mainly, for composing intermodal meanings. Forty-six sixth-grade students who attend a state primary school in the city of Ptolemaida, northern Greece participated in the study. The materials used in the study consisted of: (a) informational, print-based multimodal texts and, (b) compositions produced by students, at first individually and then in groups. The overall research is designed on a pre-test phase, an instructional intervention phase, and a post-test phase. The qualitative comparative analysis of student compositions manifests that the metalanguage of "visual design" constitutes a truly promising, pedagogically utilizable tool for the description, interpretation and comprehension of the interactions among the various semiotic modes co-existing in multimodal ensembles. This entails the development of multimodal and visual literacy skills by the primary education students. These findings highlight the need for adoption and incorporation of such a metalanguage for the design of curricula facilitating the teaching of literacy, in order to reframe the monomodal nature of communication.
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