Case Study On Junior English Learners’ Viewing Skill Based On Visual Literacy

With the latest issue of the National Senior High School English Curriculum Standards（2017 version with 2020 revision）,the development of learners’ English subject core competencies emerges as the overall goal of language learning.In this curriculum standards,the traditional four macro-skills have expanded to include a new skill of viewing.Viewing as a language skill is interpreted as the process of understanding many visual and non-continuous texts that come in various formats,such as graphics,pictures,images,mind-maps,and videos,which are now widely used by language teachers in their classroom teaching practices.In short,viewing is termed as the act of “reading” visual cues from different multimodal texts.Unfortunately,the research on viewing at both conceptual and practical levels has not informed many teachers due to their delayed attention.By taking viewing as a starting point,this study focuses on the case study of different micro-skills of viewing from visual literacy（VL）,which has been well-founded on Dual Coding Theory（DCT）and Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy.With the research focus on junior high school English learners,the research questions（RQs）are formulated from three perspectives.1)What is the status quo of the Development of viewing skills in practice? 2)To what extent can junior English learners’ skill of viewing be improved after several rounds of teaching intervention? 3)What are the micro-skills which can be effectively used in improving junior English learners’ skill of viewing?With detailed analysis of data collected from the sampled research subjects,this study finds that 1)the skill of viewing has been widely used by English teachers in their practice but with little systematic design in advance;2)After two rounds of teaching intervention,English learners are gradually improved from the extraction of factual knowledge to the understanding of deep information;3)with concentrated exercises of viewing,English leaners’ micro-skills in recognition of pictures,understanding and analyzing the deep meaning of multimodal resources can be proportionately improved.Although this research is a small sampled case study,it is hoped that the results can provide certain pedagogical inspiration for English language teachers in practice to facilitate English learners’ development of language competencies.