Visual Genres as Language Teaching Tools: Making words come alive

Abstract

This final Master work (TFM) belongs to the educational improvement method 1, that is, to the implementation and assessment of a Didactic Unit in the English language subject. We have focused our attention, in particular, on the introduction of literature in the EFL classroom as a source to instruct learners linguistically regarding to special vocabulary and the practice of some prepositions. Furthermore, our intention is to motivate the students to establish a reading habit, and to educate them in social values beyond their educative curriculum. We have centred especially on the connections between comic literary texts and superheroes and how these two can be brought together to foster creativity; promote language learning, and learner independence. In this way, the students have been instructed in the three models which deal with the cultural, linguistic and personal growth models (Carter & Long, Lazar, 1993). This proposal has been carried out during the internship at IES Vila Roja in Almazora for the second of ESO during the school year 2018-2019. In this way, the present work has tried to put into practice some investigators‘ inspiring ideas about how literature can be introduced to students not as a mandate in their curricula but in a gentle way, by creating environments where reading and writing skills in another language can be supported with some activities related to the multiple intelligences, such as the visual spatial method (Gardner, 1983) as a different approach to assessment. In order to foster reading literature to a wider range of different students‘ minds in our multicultural classroom, the students have worked on cooperative and individual visual techniques such as writing superheroes comics or drawing calligrams to develop partnership so as to achieve our goals more easily. Therefore, after the DU implementation we can observe that we have obtained an increasing students‘ interest in reading English literature, a better linguistic competence and positive students‘ attitudes towards social values.