Due to the large number of students, instructors teaching high enrollment courses often rely on traditional assignments such as scantron exams and research papers. While these types of assignments are functional and satisfy a purpose, they are typically not meaningful or pleasurable for students. In an introductory information technology course,…

This study is a critical analysis of a low-stakes in-house English as a Second Language (ESL) and English literacy test from a local program in a large city in the southwestern United States. From a critical multimodal social semiotic perspective (Kress G. Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Routledge, 2010;…

As a dance practitioner in education, Jason Ohlberg is interested in how artistic inquiry through interdisciplinary, student-centered processes can engage dancers beyond traditional choreographic practices and offer deeper contexts for learning and growth. The research described in this article began through an inter-institutional initiative,…

In schools around the country, students are increasingly asked to create visual representations of ideas and information. Slideshows, infographics, and websites have become nearly as common as text documents. Years are spent teaching students grammar and paragraph construction so that they can become strong written communicators, but rarely is the…

The study explores students' production of interactive visualized stories with visual analytics (VA). The aim is to understand emerging interactions in classrooms of grades 7-9 students when visual storytelling methods are playing a part in producing social science content. The dual aspects of visual literacy, information retrievement paired with…

Visual storytelling comes in many forms (e.g. films, comics, photographs, commercials) and is used for a range of purposes (e.g. to entertain, inform, persuade). Technological advances are enabling non-specialists to be consumers and producers of these works. Although many people are growing up surrounded by visual works, this does not mean that…

The following article explores how one researcher blended verbal and visual literacies to disrupt conceptualizations of traditional qualitative research. Engaging visual modalities as a research tool, the author invites readers into an a/r/tographical multimodal post qualitative journey that deeply explores the power and value of visual research.…

Courses: This unit activity is suited for courses with research and source citation components, such as the Basic Communication; Interpersonal, and Organizational Communication courses. Objectives: Students will (a) visually interpret and analyze instances of plagiarism; (b) revise their work to use proper citations and reduce instances of…

In a world increasingly saturated with images, the visual aesthetic dimension should play a more important role in the educational processes. Furthermore, classroom walls could be considered valuable resources to introduce visual literacy among children and teachers. However, Chilean educational policies tend not to pay much attention to visual…

Astronomy classes that teach students to read and write images, diagrams, and plots offer an ideal venue to teach visual literacy.

This study begins with the assumption that visual and related literacies are essential frameworks to foster not only students' learning of visual communication principles, but also 21st century skills such as creative problem solving and self-directed learning. We focus on assignment directions as a particular instructional component. In contrast…

The present article explores the idea of using movies in EFL classrooms to develop students' writing skill. In this qualitative study, 15 EFL learners were engaged in different writing activities in a contextualized form of movies, meaning that the films acted as text-books, and activities were designed based on the contexts of the films. Taking…

Visual texts are part of everyday communication and they have the potential to carry multiple layers of meaning. This complexity is what makes them an ideal resource not only for language learning, but also for developing learners' intercultural communicative competence and cultural awareness. Cultural meanings are not locked into these materials;…

This article discusses the potential and challenges of teaching a second-semester German class with Simon Schwartz's graphic novel "drüben!" (2009) alongside a traditional textbook. While the class explored linguistic, literary, and cultural-historical aspects of "drüben!," a GDR-themed family memoir, the focus here is on those…

This paper is concerned with multimodal literacy involving the different kinds of knowledge required to fully access texts with multiple semiotic resources used in reading comprehension test tasks. Such literacy requirements have not drawn researchers' attention to date, mainly because the foreign language teaching and testing project has…