Preparing Students for Reading in an Image-Based World: Insights from EFL Teachers

Abstract

Images are more and more prominent in contemporary society, with social media being a big contributor. As the education at school should reflect today’s society, the increase in use of images should also be evident in classes. The new definition of text found in the curriculum, was expanded in 2012 to include images and other modes of communication as part of the term text. The English curriculum states that multimodal texts shall be used in the English classes, however, it is uncertain how this works in practice. I have therefore investigated how teachers of the Norwegian EFL classroom both understand and use text. The data material for this thesis has been collected by conducting a small-scale interview study, featuring a qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews to interview four English teachers at primary and lower secondary school. These interviews bring insight in how the teachers use multimodal texts and work with the new definition of text. By analysing the data, uncovering theoretical knowledge, didactic practices and challenges have helped create insight into how the current EFL teachers work with text. While all the teachers are aware of the expanded text term, there is still little use of images in today’s classrooms. It seems that written text is favoured, and textbooks are used extensively, while composite or multimodal texts, although specified in the curriculum, are used superficially. The teachers present several challenges, such as the current text culture, familiarity, time management and structure of the curriculum. These challenges affect different aspects, where familiarity and time relate to the students and the didactic practices, whilst the text culture and curriculum comes from the guidance documents and general perception of text. The teachers in this study display a theoretical awareness of how to use images, but have rarely used images as the main teaching material. To address the issues, teachers need more guidance and examples to better integrate multimodal texts in their lessons. There also needs to be more emphasis on teaching images and multimodal texts in the teacher education, as well as a disruption of the current written text culture which limits teachers in terms of methods