Visual literacy and the development of narrative language: A case study using digital animation production tools in early childhood education
Submitted by:
Athina Spyridoula Tsezou
Abstract:
During their early years, children come across all kinds of images (digital, printed etc) both in school and outside school, which highlights the importance of visual literacy. Animation, a rather new attractive graphic devices, has the potential to be used as a learning tool in education, being a pleasant one at the same time, as it improves one’s understanding, especially children’s understanding, who have not fully developed their literacy skills contributing to the improvement of the expected learning outcomes. In this context, the aim of the study was to explore the impact of the use of animation images on preschool students’ development of narrative speech. The participants of the study were 12 preschool children from a kindergarten class in an urban area of West Greece; particularly, 6 students were four to five years old, while the rest six were five to six years old. The research was implemented in five stages. Firstly, a narration of three carefully-selected familiar stories was carried out while the researcher was showing relevant images from the books. In the second stage, the students were asked to draw four pictures in groups capturing the flow of the story without revealing the end. In the third stage, the members of each group were asked to provide their own idea about the plot and ending of the story, though it seemed that they had difficulties in imagining a different ending of the story. Thus, during the fourth stage some key words were provided to children by the researcher to offer them some help. Finally, the children watched the animation of each story made through the clipaflip.com application; each story ending was structured in such a way that young children could narrate it. The findings of the study indicated that the animated images, when they are intentionally used in the educational procedure, contributed to young student’ development of narrative speech in terms of sequence and description, as all of them were able to accurately understand the expected finale, 10 of them narrated the stories, while 6 developed a different ending of the story by adding possible extensions. The findings of the study highlight the contribution of visual literacy, particularly, animation images, to young student meaning-making, narrative speech and vocabulary development attracting, at the same time, their interest, cultivating their imagination, boosting their creativity, reducing their stress and activating even the poor students to participate in the educational procedure. The
present study aspires to contribute to the relevant research and draws implications for the educators and policymakers highlighting the importance of adopting transformative methodologies in the teaching process to make learners active agents and meaning-makers and design learning experiences that rely on various semiotic resources.
Key-words: Visual literacy, multimodal texts, narrative speech, Early Childhood Education