Heuristic for Analysis of Visuals in Modern Language Texts

Iconic language (descriptive; close reading)

• Take a census of visuals used in first 40 pages of three texts (What is it made of? What does it contain worth explaining?
• Photographs
• Representative speakers
• Celebrities
• Cultural representations (landscapes, architecture, festivals, art, etc.)
• General human interaction
• Representative genres (ads, posters, schedules, etc.)
• Thumbnails
• Background
• Line drawings
• Cartoons with dialogue
• Classification (i.e. scenes or things that are labeled with vocabulary)
• Concepts
• Maps

• Use Kress and van Leeuwen’s framework for examining representative visuals of first two tlypes, above (What do you see in the artefact?)
• Narrative representations
• Conceptual representations
• Position of and interaction with viewer
• Context of layout

The cultural language (links to larger culture/social context)

• Consider the layout and how representative visuals are being used (What is the context?)
• What appears to be the pedagogical purpose?
• What cultural allusions are being made?
• What universal (i.e. shared human values) are being evoked?

• Briefly define the audience, in this case is pretty straightforward (Who is the audience?)
•  The audience is university students in the United States, probably native speakers of English, and culturally mainstream.  Assumed to be 18-22 years of age.  (Visuals reinforce this)

The theoretical language (stance; lens for understanding)

• What do the findings reveal about how visuals are used in language pedagogy?  (What does it mean? How do we interpret it?)
• Do the visuals leverage cultural stereotypes to make meaning more predictable and therefore, enhance language learning?  In what ways, might this be a positive or negative thing?

• What does this say about disciplinary differences in the use of visuals in textbooks?

• What does this say about how visuals represent linguistic concepts at all?  (Nowhere is this more straightforward, after all, than in a language textbook.)

Artifact: Sample page and partial analysis

• This is a line drawing, a variation of cartoon with dialogue.  Notice that the purpose is to construct the situation in which the dialogue, above the pictures, would occur.

• Notice the interaction between participants within the picture.  In Kress and van Leeuwen's terms there is a transactional reaction in both scenes. That this should be the case is highly appropriate for a verbal dialogue between multiple participants, as in a language textbook.

• Notice that in both cases there is a small image of a house framed within, in the first picture, a computer screen, and in the second, a cell phone.  Not only does this establish the topic of the conversation in a very concrete way, but it can be assumed to appeal to the target audience, for whom images on a screen such as these would a normal conversation starter.