A Survey On The Current Situation Of High School Students' English "seeing" Skills Development From The Perspective Of Visual Literacy

With the rapid development of information technology,the “image-reading era” is coming quietly.Visual culture has become one of the mainstream cultural forms of the modern society,in that visual materials have appeared in every aspect of our life.This new change has made visual literacy essential to the public.Thus,National English Curriculum standards for General High school(2017 edition),to keep up with the times,attaches great importance to the cultivation of students' visual literacy,by enriching and expanding the connotative meaning of language skills.On the basic of four traditional language skills(listening,speaking,reading and writing),“viewing” is added to them as a new one,which attaches a sense of new era to language skills.The study,based on the perspective of visual literacy,selecting some of high school students and teachers as research objects from two high schools in Qufu,Shandong Province,and adopting questionnaire survey,interview,classroom observation as research methods,attempts to investigate the current situation of “viewing” cultivation,aiming to explore the following three research questions:(1)What is senior high school students' current level in terms of English “viewing” skill from the perspective of visual literacy?(2)At present,in what ways do high school English teachers cultivate their students' “viewing” skill in English classes?(3)Are there any problems in the cultivation process? If there are,what are they? And what are the causes of the problems?The results show that:(1)The overall level of English “viewing” skill of senior high school students is unsatisfactory.Although they perform well on some of the specific skills at different levels,they have not manifested,on the whole,desirable specific skills of different kinds,with much room for improvement.(2)At present,high school English teachers,in cultivation of these skills,often adopt the way of information transformation,by which text is transformed into charts/tables,videos,mind-maps,and the multi-modal methods,including image & text,sound& text,image & sound,image & text & sound.(3)The cultivation of English “viewing” is at an initial stage in that it's a new language skill,where students are exposed to only a single type of visual materials,especially in real classroom practice;teachers,in real English classroom teaching,tend to ignore the cultivation of specific skills integrated with expressive skills,thus having lost the sight of specific skill cultivation at high level;besides,teachers rarely assign after-class tasks to consolidate and implement students “viewing”,lacking after-class tracking of how students form and reinforce these skills by themselves.The causes of these problems lie in insufficient theoretical training,teaching and learning resources,practical guidance and items for examination.The research,based on the results,suggests that(1)teachers should timely receive relevant theoretical training and practical guidance.In English teaching,teachers should attach great importance to the development of students' specific English “viewing” skill with efficient guidance,pay attention to the integration of “viewing” skill with expressive skills,and increase extracurricular English “viewing” skill training.(2)Students should change the attitude of“viewing”,pay attention to the process of using the specific skills of “viewing”,so as to master the strategy of “viewing”.(3)Teaching resource developers should actively develop relevant teaching and learning resources to provide rich visual materials for the cultivation of this skill.(4)Education departments should include the skills of “viewing” in English examinations.Of course,this study,due to the limitation of time and resources,still has some shortcomings,such as a small sample size of the respondents and questionnaires may not having fully measured the development of students' “viewing” skill.However,on the whole,this study has reached its' expected goals,and the results are satisfactory.It can provide reference for the cultivation of current senior high school students' English “viewing” skill,and also serve as a modest spur to induce someone to come forward with his valuable contributions in this field.