A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words: The Use of Pictures to Promote Literacy and Reading in Foundation Phase and ABET-Level 1 Learners

Abstract

Since time immemorial, pictorial images have been used to illustrate, document, map, narrate, and facilitate textual and verbal information. The facilitation and illustration of texts through pictorial support have an added advantage in the sense that it stimulates both spheres of the human brain, thus making lasting effects on the impression of cognitive understanding of the content read and boosting reading comprehension. These positive effects and benefits are observed in storybooks with illustrations that present an aesthetic appeal and typographic interplay to the reader. In recent years, texts and stories have been conveyed and disseminated through visual compositions, creative outputs and visual narrations that are presently enhanced by digital technology. This is a conceptual paper that is conducted from a constructivist point of view, reviewing literature on photo elicitation where pictures are used as aids to facilitate comprehension in textual readings. It is argued that the eradication of illiteracy through reading is a less intuitive and rather complex process that requires the reader to read the text at hand with good comprehension and understanding. The study concludes that pictorial images are worth being part of the typography of texts because they create the necessary visual appeal and support the reading process, especially for foundation phase and adult basic education and training (ABET) level 1 learners.