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Since an ever increasing range of texts in paper and electronic media are including images as a means of conveying meaning independently and in interaction with language, developing literacy as a part of language learning can no longer be considered to be concerned with words alone. This paper reports a study of the role of images in secondary school textbooks for teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) in Vietnam. In some textbooks images were principally resources for arousing motivation, invoking students' background knowledge of a topic or as or as visual cues to accessing the meaning of vocabulary in texts. In another kind of textbook images were included within the reading materials, and learning experiences involved students in deriving meaning from the images and from the relationship between the images and the language, which served as much richer language learning resources. This kind of integration of image and language reflects the multimodal nature of a large proportion of authentic texts in English and hence, for all language learners, whether in contexts of first language learning (L1), English as a second language (ESL) or English as a foreign language (EFL), learning to construct meaning from the interaction of image and language is a crucial aspect of language competence. The need for language teaching to attend specifically to this aspect of meaning-making is directly supported by research showing that, in a very large scale study, approximately half the cohort of primary school students experienced difficulty comprehending text segments where particular kinds of image-language relations were the focus of the meanings at stake. It is therefore proposed that TESOL textbooks need to incorporate learning experiences that prepare those learning English as a second or foreign language to be able to negotiate the meanings made by images and image-language interaction in English texts. |
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