The Image in English Language Teaching

reviewed by Mario Rinvolucri, UK

Mario Rinvolucri, is a Pilgrims associate, who co-authored around 20 EFL methodology books between 1974 and 2010. Nearly all his collaborators were strongly Pilgrims-connected and they have ensured that these books are rich and multi-focused. He is also ex-Editor of HLT.

Edited by Kieran Donaghy and Daniel Xerri
ELT Council, Malta, 2017
ISBN 978-99957-1-151-1

My thanks go to Hania Kryszewska, HLT editor, for asking me to review this book which is full of things I did not know about; she still hopes I am intellectually alive at the age of 77!

A word about the methodology of this review: in the first part of the text I hope to give, you, the reader, an idea of what the book is about and the areas it covers. I hope to do this as faithfully as possible and with as little intrusion as possible of my own opinions and biases. To achieve this objective much of what I write will be in the authors' own words or will report their ideas, more briefly than they do. In the second part of the review I will become judgemental and let rip with my own reactions, thoughts and feelings.

The idea of dividing the corn of what the authors say from the chaff of my opinions is something I have learnt in reading reviews written in the German speaking lands.

The fourth of the eighteen articles that make up this book is headed The Power of Video, by Antonia Clare. To demonstrate how ubiquitous images are today, she notes the following:

• three hundred hours of video are uploaded to You Tube every hour.
• if a person wants to do something they have never done before they will watch a video rather than rummage around for a book ( One of her children learnt to play the guitar from a video. Another built a world in Minecraft, again from video. Rapping in Spanish was video mediated, learning new skateboard routines: the same way, ditto finding out how to cook curries).

Antonia suggests that there is natural tendency for a child to move on from the role of consumer and become a creator. One of her children learnt origami from the screen and then quite naturally produced a video of his own on paper folding. This at the age of eight.

In article 5, The power of image nation, Magdalena Wasilewska from Poland suggests that most of her students are happy with Pinterest and Instagram, that they all have smart phones. She says they are digital natives, Generation like, the Selfie generation, screenagers. She quotes Gangwer (2009) as saying that "children think in pictures, see in pictures and communicate in pictures."

I think it is fair to say that most of the contributors to this volume agree with Antonia and Magdalena that we now live in a uniquely picture dominated age and teachers have to sprint to keep up with their teenage students who take plethoric images for granted.

The Image in English Language Teaching is mostly written by people who are full-time teachers for whom writing about their work is a spin-off. As you might expect the articles are nearly all extremely practical and give you concrete suggestions as to how you can put the natural visual aptitude of the students to good use in learning more English.

Let us look at article 10, Images on canvas: art thinking and creativity in ELT. The author, Chrysa Papalazarou, teaches 6th grade primary school children who are 12 years old and who are roughly A2 as far as level goes. In one of her classes she showed the children Keith Haring's 2 Buddies, a picture in which two seated men lean in towards each other, their arms open. She then does a series of exercises based on the children looking ever more closely at the picture.

Activity 1

The students work on their own and write notes on what they can see.

One girl wrote:

I see bright colours two happy people
friendship two happy people hugging each other
I think I see two people maybe they are dancing maybe they are fighting
Are they....?

Activity 2

SEE/THINK/WONDER (this is with a new picture)

One student wrote:

SEE

I see a tomato carrying along many shells
A tomato from above
A spiral shape that looks like a snake or a whirl
A big shiny snake flying in the blue bright sky

THINK

It is a strange painting
The painting will drag me in a strange world
It is a strange but beautiful painting
It symbolises that we are different

WONDER

If you fall into it, where will it end?
What was the artist thinking when he painted it?
What does it really show?
Why are the colours only blue and yellow?

Activity 3

For this you need to show the students a picture with three or more people in it.

After the class has had a good hard look at the picture, group the students in threes and ask each student to choose one person that interests them.

They then step into the role of this person and tell the others how things are from their point of view.

I hope the above descriptive lines give you some idea of the rich things you will find in this anthology of articles that were originally prepared for a series of Conferences organised to explore the way the visual side of things could be used to make learning English more real and more fun for screenager learners. I have really learnt a lot doing my homework for this review.

Now, as I move into the role of critic, I feel uneasy as I have come to really love the dedication and enthusiasm of these writer-teachers.

However some basic criticism of this book is inevitable. (Notice how I slime off into the third person with a dummy subject to try, hopelessly, to deny responsibility for what I am going to write.)

It is odd for 18 people to write a book about images without reference the massive human capacity to create images internally. Let me tell you a bit about Lake Maggiore, the long thin one that goes down from Switzerland to quite near Milan. There are some beautiful islands half the way down this long thin expanse of water. Isola Bella, for example.

I wonder if you stayed faithfully with my words or if a lake or river from your own experience popped onto your mental screen in its full, compelling beauty?

When listening to a story many people will create a suite of images, some will even find themselves running inner-eye films of great beauty, some very close to the story they are hearing and some that diverge off in quite new directions. One thing I am certain of when I tell a story is that there will be as many different visualisations in the room as there are people. I know that the Mario story has been transformed in ways that I sometimes find overwhelming. To make no mention of images generated from within in a book on images is bizarre.

I also have to quarrel with the suggestion that our kids have suddenly been turned into visualisers by the technology of their day. The creating of inner images has been a gift humans have enjoyed since... like… always. I allowed my inner dream-maker who takes me to strange places maybe one night in three and shows me things I had never known before in deep or shallow dreams to have a look at the book. He was amazed at the idea that technological change has suddenly got us visualising... he was bereft of breath as well as words.

Now I know that NLP has not been universally accepted by the EFL language teaching world but it does have some very interesting things to say about the detail of how we create mental images. Neuro-linguistic-Programming suggests these "sub-modalities" of the way we make our images. Here are some of the main ones:

In colour or black and white
In a frame or unbounded
How deep? (2 or 3 dimensional)
Distance of self from the picture.
Size of the picture.
Location: to the right, to the left, up or down?
Blurred or focused and sharp.
Still or moving picture

To ignore the sensory thinking of NLP is not a good idea when thinking about images.

A good book to read in tandem with the one we are discussing is Introducing NLP, O'Connor and Seymour, Element, 1990

There is something about the critical state of mind that I find uncreative and in the case of the book under discussion, ungenerous.

Have a varied, exciting read of the work of real screen face practitioners.

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teaching English through NLP and Coaching course at Pilgrims website.