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The social world, and also the world of meaning, is immensely different from the one we lived in thirty or forty years ago. As a result, we experience the feeling that all our structures, our theories, and our resources are not suitable enough to meet the frames and requirements of the new world of meaning. The semiotic world has evolved, the symbols we satisfactorily used in the past look ineffective when we consider their usage nowadays.

The impact of these social and semiotic changes is evident everywhere, particularly in relation to representation and communication, in all its different manifestations, including the teaching of English. Everything that had been effective in our classes decades ago is no longer apt for the students who occupy our classrooms at present. While years ago we, sometimes, referred to paralinguistic features, they have now become an essential part of representation and communication. As a consequence, visual literacy has taken a central part in our teaching practices today.

The multiple resources for making meaning (in the form of multimodal approaches) make it necessary for teachers to commit to the task of designing semiotically apt environments where efficient learning takes place. This means that, in order for contemporary students’ learning to be successful, teachers need to consider their learners’ subjectivities – their characteristics, their interests, and their needs – in order to design lessons that are apt for both curriculum and pedagogy.  In our case, as teachers of English as a foreign language, our task becomes highly difficult, but at the same time, results will prove to be immensely rewarding in our new environments.

In this module, we will center our attention on different ways to approach the teaching practices to the contemporary learners that fill our classrooms nowadays. We will be discussing how to boost the skills that 21st-century students need to develop in order to succeed in the rapidly changing world they are living in.

Nora Lía Cortés y Cecilia González

El curso está destinado a:

• Profesoras/es de inglés en ejercicio docente en el nivel secundario o superior, incluyendo funciones de dirección, orientación, asesoramiento o supervisión en establecimientos educativos de nivel secundario o superior;
• Referentes jurisdiccionales y/o equipo técnico pedagógico del área de Inglés;
• Profesoras/es de Inglés inscriptas/os en los listados de orden de mérito para el acceso a la docencia para el nivel secundario;
• Personas que cuenten con título de traductor/a de inglés o licenciado/a en inglés para ejercer la docencia de Inglés en el nivel Secundario o en el nivel Superior de la formación docente y están actualmente ejerciendo ese rol.

Lesson 1: The World in Images

Objectives

By the end of this class teachers will be able to:

• Discover the relevance of the image in 21st-century classrooms.
• Analyze what visual literacy is and explore its importance in secondary school classrooms. 
• Understand the value of images in developing different kinds of activities.
• Get familiar with the term multiliteracy pedagogy and its relevance in English classrooms.

Contents

• The value of the image in 21st-century classrooms. The way images affect students in their everyday life and in English classes.
• Visual literacy and the way communication occurs through images.
• Different activities include different kinds of images. 
• Multiliteracy pedagogy and its effects in English classrooms.

Lesson 2: Teaching the way our students learn

Objectives

By the end of this lesson teachers will be able to:

• Understand how to teach a visual generation.
• Comprehend how teenagers learn and how this affects activities in the classroom.
• Discover how to include still and moving images in the English classroom.
• Create efficient activities with videos in the classroom. 

Contents

• Teaching the way our students learn. 
• How to teach a visual generation.  
• Filmmaking in the classroom.
•  Why is it necessary to create videos in 21st-century  classrooms? 

Lesson 3: Memes and effective presentations as motivational means of communication in the EFL classroom

Objectives

By the end of this lesson teachers will be able to:

• Reflect upon the value of images as pedagogical material. 
• Discover different alternatives to work with images in the classroom.

Contents

• Memes as a motivational means of communication in the EFL classroom
• The meanings of images through the power of memes. 
• Why is the use of memes necessary in the EFL classroom?
• How can memes be used as a powerful source in the classroom?
• Effective presentations through the use of images.

Lesson 4: Using still images to encourage genuine communication and enhance personalized learning in the EFL classroom

Objectives

By the end of the lesson teachers will be able to: 

• Discover the new connotation the word literacy holds nowadays.
• Consolidate the notion that visual literacy is made up of integrating different types of images.
• Integrate different images to improve a lesson plan significantly.
• Design communicative activities which effectively cater to the different subjectivities in the classroom.

Contents

• Literacy in 21st-century classrooms.
• How to use images to develop visual literacy.
• The relevance of syntax and semantics in the analysis of images.