초등학교 사회 교과서에 제시된 시각 매체의 특성 및 읽기 방향 탐색1)

Abstract

Social studies textbook was written in letters and inscriptions such as pictures, photos, maps and others. So reading the textbook refers to reading inscriptions as well as letters. Inscriptions are also a cluster of meanings. Thus, students need to understand what the meanings the inscriptions imply are when they read. Interestingly, students tend to go through a different process of acquiring socials studies knowledge from the process of reading a written language. For instance, students should learn map symbols to read a map. Accordingly, this study aims to find the ways to improve students’ reading ability adaptable for social studies textbook by exploring the types and roles of inscriptions in social studies textbook. For the data analysis, inscriptions were grouped as photos, pictures/cartoons, graphs, tables, and maps. Their roles were analyzed and categorized by the degree of social studies knowledge the inscriptions have. As a result, I found that pictures/cartoons are most popularly used in textbook and they play explanatory and complementary roles in describing the social studies content. To improve reading ability for inscriptions, teachers should provide a plenty of opportunities for students to read different types of inscriptions and learn how to read a compound format of text.