A picture can generate a thousand words …

Pictures provide a versatile, engaging and low-cost resource for teaching. Nowadays, with online resources such as Pixabay, it is simple to find a suitable picture for almost anything which is free to use. However, printing high-quality, durable pictures which are big enough for group activities may not be feasible for many teachers. Images can be projected onto a screen, if the requisite technology is available, but there is also a place for pictures which students can handle and move around.

We now have a fairly extensive picture library in our staffroom because we make a point of asking people we know to save their old calendars at the end of the year so that we have a new selection of pictures to play with each January. Calendars tend to be printed on relatively heavy paper which will stand up to use in the classroom. They are colourful, and generally come as a themed set which teachers can then exploit, or use to mix and match.

You can use pictures, of course, to group students, present new vocabulary, as flashcards or for cues in drills (McAlpin, 1980: 13). In these cases, pictures provide the ‘extralinguistic clues’ (Richards & Rogers, 1986: 129) which help make teacher input comprehensible to learners. As Lightbown & Spada state (2006: 63) ‘there is ample evidence that positive motivation is associated with a willingness to keep learning’. How can a beautiful, amusing or intriguing picture fail to motivate students to admire, comment or speculate?

General uses

1. Cut up pictures to produce a pairing/grouping activity. Choose similar pictures and cut similar shapes to make it more challenging.

2. Distribute similar pictures to each student in class. Instruct the students to find the person who they think has the picture most similar to their own and agree together on the connection between the two images.

3. (With two copies of each picture) By describing what you can see, find your match.

4. Distribute pictures randomly to pairs/groups. Students come up with an explanation of why the picture was taken/drawn.

5. Distribute pictures randomly to pairs/groups. Students describe what is going on ‘out of shot’. If there are people in the picture, they can describe what the people are seeing from their perspective.

6. In pairs, students take turns to describe their picture so that their partner can draw it.

7. Show an individual student a picture selected from a group of similar pictures. Give them time to memorise as much as possible. The student has to describe their picture from memory so that their classmates can select the correct picture from a selection. This can be made competitive if you divide the class into teams. Make sure you decide in advance whether to penalise incorrect guesses.

In addition, by using pictures without any language input, you can assess students’ ability to recall and reproduce language without forcing them in a particular direction – they can say what they are able to say about a picture without being distracted, confused or influenced by a rubric. However, one can go further than merely describing pictures (Pit Corder’s ‘talking about images’) to ‘talking with images’, so using pictures to engender a personal response (quoted in Donaghy & Xerri, 2017: 1). In fact, Cambridge English Examinations require students to speak on the basis of a visual prompt, and more able students are expected to go beyond just description, so calendar pictures can be used as an excellent basis for practice activities.

Landscapes

I am from Wales but teach in Kent which has a very different landscape, so I often use calendar images from around my home to show students how it is different to the local area.

1. Almost any picture can be used to generate descriptions of places or holidays. Multiple pictures can be used to illustrate a sales pitch for a travel offer, and this could be a written or spoken text.

2. Discuss the advantages and/or disadvantages of living/working in this place or area.

3. Compare and contrast two different pictures.

4. Compare and contrast a picture with the area where the student lives.

5. Generate second conditionals with stems such as ‘If I were there, I would …’, ‘If I lived/worked/studied there, I would …’ or ‘If my family were planning to move there, I would …’.

6. If this was a still from a film, what would the story be?

Most coursebooks include language based around discussing people, often using ‘famous’ people that students may not know or be interested in. If you have calendar pictures which involve non-celebrities, they allow far more scope for speculation and invention.

People

1. Explain the occasion for the picture to be taken.

2. Describe this person’s character.

3. Tell the story of this person’s life.

4. Explain the connection between different people in the picture(s).

5. Add speech bubbles to recreate the conversation between the participants.

The natural environment is another common topic, so why not use pictures involving the natural world to see if students spontaneously use the language you have recently covered? If they don’t, reflect on the reasons – do they need a reminder to make an effort to use language they have learned? Are they struggling to make a connection between their language lessons and real-life uses of English? Have they just forgotten?

Animals

1. ‘Who owns this pet? / This is my pet because … / This would make the perfect pet for a [seven]- year-old girl/boy because …’.

2. (e.g. Zoo pictures) Describe where and how this animal lives now compared with where it came from.

3. ‘A day in the life …’ from the animal’s perspective.

4. Describe what is happening/what has happened/what might happen to this animal’s habitat.

5. Where this animal lives now compared with where it came from.

6. What would be the advantages/disadvantages of keeping this animal as a pet?

The human environment – most students have an important building or two in their country that they are proud of. You can prepare them to talk about what’s important to them by working with images of other buildings from around the world. It’s also a good introduction for talking about differences between countries and what the reasons behind these differences might be.

Buildings

1. What the purpose of a building is/was.

2. Comparisons of size, age, attractiveness, suitability for a named event or occasion.

3. Speculation on why a particular building was built the way it was, why certain materials were used.

4. Role-playing an estate agent and house-hunter interaction.

5. Well-known monuments or buildings you would (not) like to visit and why.

6. The history of a famous building or famous people connected to it.

Art calendars

Paintings are one of the most productive types of visual image, in my experience. Naturally, this is due to the fact there is always a story behind the image. Chrysa Papalazarou (2017) has some wonderful ideas for using art in ‘Images on canvas: art, thinking and creativity in ELT’.

1. What was the inspiration for the painting? Why was the subject chosen?

2. Are there any symbols in the painting – what do they signify?

3. When was the picture created? Who was the artist?

4. What materials were used? How were they produced? How long did it take to paint?

Mixed sets of pictures

1. Construct a story connecting the people and places. Add in a few animals to see what happens.

2. Find roughly matching subjects to create ‘then and now’ pairings for comparison – old and new buildings or cityscapes are the easiest topics to do this with. Or old and young people.

3. Create storyboards as inspiration for written work, radio plays or sketches to act out.

Calendar roulette

You can even take a selection of random images into class with you and let the students come up with their own ideas on what they want to talk about or use the pictures for.

The first step is to put a varied collection together. Canvas friends, family and colleagues for their old calendars at the end of the year and then see what you get. Teachers find nice images as inspiring as students!

References

Donaghy K & Xerri D (2017) The Image in ELT: An Introduction. In K Donaghy & D Xerri (Eds). The Image in English Language Teaching (pp.1– 11) Malta: ELT Council.

Lightbown P & Spada N (2006) How Languages are Learned (Third edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McAlpin J (1980) The Magazine Picture Library. London: George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd.

Papalazarou C (2017) Images on canvas: art, thinking and creativity in ELT. In K Donaghy & D Xerri (Eds). The Image in English Language Teaching (pp.89 – 103) Malta: ELT Council.

Richards J & Rogers M (1986) Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.