What skills do our young English language learners need in order to communicate effectively and make sense of the world? Traditionally literacy has been thought of as having the ability to read and write, but is that really sufficient in the media and information-rich world we live in? Our young learners need to be able to do far more than read and write to understand, contribute, and participate successfully, both in and outside of the English language classroom.
Enter: multiple literacies, a set of skills that enable us to ‘read’ the world in many different ways. There’s no one set definition of this term or exactly which skills should be included, but textual literacy, visual literacy, media literacy, social literacy, and global literacy cover a wide range of areas, are frequently referenced in other global frameworks, and are particularly relevant to young learners of English. Here are some simple class activities to help your young learners develop these skills:
Visual Literacy: Compare and contrast
Choose an image to share with your students (a high-impact one such as those used in National Geographic Learning’s Trailblazer program works well!). Ask your students to compare and contrast their own experience with what they can see in the picture. For example, if you use this picture showing children at school, ask your learners what they can see in the picture, how this is the same or different to their classroom, what they like (and don’t like!) about school, who they spend time with, etc. This type of activity helps learners develop their visual literacy skills by asking them to look closely at and describe a picture, in addition to building their cultural awareness.
Textual Literacy: Predict from pictures
Provide scaffolding for a reading task by using the images that accompany a text or story as a starting point. Ask learners to use the pictures to help them predict what they think the text will be about. For younger or lower-level learners, teachers can provide more support by eliciting what they can see in each picture before moving on to making predictions about the text.
For example, before reading this text on Virtual Learning, you could ask your learners questions such as:
- Do you recognize any of the places in these pictures?
- Do you know where these places are?
- In which school subject would you learn about these places? Why?
Social Literacy: Develop learners’ skills through reading
Reading texts or comic strips can provide a great opportunity for young learners to explore and develop their social skills. For example, focusing on and discussing the facial expressions or postures in illustrations can help learners practice recognizing and understanding the emotions of others. Teachers can also encourage their students to think about or discuss other social skills as they relate to a text. For example, in this comic from Trailblazer Level 2, teachers can ask questions about how the characters work as a team and help each other.
Media Literacy: Developing students’ research skills
When completing project work, we often ask our students to find information on a particular topic, but how much time do we spend developing their research skills? Before setting students a research task, it can be beneficial to discuss where and how they can find accurate, reliable information. This can be taught even from a young age. For example, if young learners are looking at information found online, they might want to consider questions like:
- Who is the author?
- Where was the information published?
- What information does the website include and what does it look like?
- When was the information published or updated?
- Why did the author create this?
It is also important to help young learners understand that they can find many different types of information online. This activity from Trailblazer encourages students to consider a few types of online resources and the different information they can get from each resource.
Global Literacy: Me, My Community, My World
Use a simple graphic organizer of concentric circles to help your young learners think globally and understand how they are part of a greater whole. For example, take a unit’s big question of “How do we understand each other?” Ask learners to brainstorm what would this look like:
- Within their inner circle? (their family, friends, and people they know)
- In their middle circle? (their community, school or neighborhood)
- In their outer circle? (in their town, their country, or the wider world)
Each unit in Trailblazer starts with a Big Question that students explore throughout the unit in the form of a fiction text, nonfiction text, and a piece of media. All these inputs help students relate the big question to their inner, middle, and outer circles.
To learn more about multiple literacies and how you can put them into practice in your English language classroom, download our position paper, ‘Multiple Literacies in the English Language Classroom’.
