Visual literacy for language teachers by Sylvia Karastathi

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 10, 2017 12.00-13.00 38 Amalias Ave. Syntagma

Dr. Sylvia Karastathi is a teacher educator and lecturer in TESOL at the Department of English Language and Language Teaching at New York College, Athens, Greece.  Her PhD thesis was on contemporary literature and visual culture (University of Cambridge, UK) and she holds and MA in Modern Literature and Culture (University of York, UK). In 2015 she was awarded the Cambridge DELTA. 

She has previously published in the field of word and image studies in The Museal Turn (2012) and The Handbook of Intermediality (2015). Her current research focuses on visual culture and visual literacy in language education. Sylvia is a member of the Visual Arts Circle, a community of practice with a shared belief in the value of visual arts in education. https://visualartscircle.com/ of viewing and representing.

Few language teachers can claim that they never use still or moving images in their lessons; yet, this standard practice is rarely touched upon in teacher training curricula on the assumption that the way to introduce images into lessons is self-evident. This talk will introducing key ELT resources on using images in the classroom and will subsequently argue that we need to approach images not simply as an aid but as a key component of multimodal communicative competence. As more voices in the profession are stressing the importance of addressing visual literacy in the language classroom, I will suggest some classroom activities for cultivating the 21st century skills of viewing and representing.