I am delighted to be featured in TESOL Press's title: New Ways in Teaching Visual Literacy.

This book shares teaching techniques, tools and activities from almost a hundred expert educators in the field of English Language Teaching.

The book is published by the TESOL International Association and Edited by Lisa Hovarth and Susan Iannuzzi, it is essential inspiration for any language teacher.

Visual literacy allows learners to successfully explore, analyse, understand, process and create a variety of visual content. For example photos, infographics, pictures, visual metaphors, icons and comics.

These abilities help learners to confidently navigate a variety of everyday tasks, such as interpreting data in a graph, understanding emotions in an illustration or considering diverse perspectives and opinions inspired by a photo.

Visual literacy is an essential skill. People who are visually literate can think critically about the graphic content that they encounter, process information, check facts and communicate effectively in a range of ways.

It can also help students learn more effectively. Visuals help students decode, understand and remember information. Using visual thinking techniques can also help learners create their own study materials.

The New Ways in Teaching Visual Literacy book includes topics such as:

Classroom activities in this section explore photographs and illustrations. Students can develop skills in analysing and interpreting photos, exploring images through different lenses, comparing photos and making inferences.

This part of the book shares English language teaching activities based around video content. For example, connecting audio and visual content, visual storyteling, vlogging, creating reels and creating collaborative vision boards.

Social media plays a huge role in our daily lives. The teaching ideas here focus on meme creation, images for advocacy and deconstructing stereotypes.

In this section, students are given the opportunity to express themselves through creating their own comics, art and visual road maps.

Semiotics is the study of signs, symbols and how they are interpreted around the world.

This part of the book contains a variety of activities for learners to explore and discuss emojis, iconography and street signs.

The educational activities in this part of the book focus on developing multimodal skills. Students can create and discuss posters, think critically about advertisements and describe mixed media.

The ability to visualise helps students to connect concepts, use their imagination and create plans. These activities include interpreting graphs, charts and diagrams as well as abstract concepts such as visual metaphors and note taking.

My activity is a simple hand drawn graphic to express three narrative tenses: past simple, past progressive and past perfect. It uses:

• the visual metaphor of a hill on the horizon to express background information (past continuous/progressive).

• two arrows, one in front of the other, to express one action happening after another (past perfect)

• multiple arrows for finished actions that happened in the past (past simple.

To see it and get the teachers notes, you'll need to grab a copy!

You can order your paper or electronic copy of this resource here:

TESOL Press: New Ways in Teaching Visual Literacy