Teaching Literacy through Visual Arts: From Visual to Textual Rhetoric

Abstract

This paper highlights the role of the integration of moving images, among which the film holds a predominant position, in the development of students‟ literacy skills. Twenty-one sixth-grade students who attend a state primary school in the city of Thessaloniki, northern Greece participated in the study. The materials used in the study consisted of a semi-structured interview, film trailers, film guides, “The Muppets” film as well as texts and images produced by students during the teaching intervention conducted in the language classroom. The data analysis shows that, in spite of the unfamiliarity of students with visual literacy practices in the classroom, as revealed through the pre-test phase, de-symbolization and interpretation skills of kineikonic information were successfully developed along with transcoding skills from one semiotic mode to another