In a world where the vast majority of texts our students are encountering and dealing with are visual texts or multimodal texts that use visuals, the importance of visual literacy increases greatly. In this session, we will explore what visual literacy is, why it is important in language education, how two new skills, viewing and visually representing, have been added to the traditional skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking in the English language curricula of a number of countries, and explore a number of simple, tried-and-tested viewing frameworks that help students become more active and effective viewers of photos, paintings, films and videos.

Teachers will go away from the session with a clear understanding of what visual literacy is and a number of tried-and-tested viewing frameworks to use with their students.