Promoting Visual Literacy Awareness through Reading Advertisements

Visual literacy is a relevant topic in education because people communicate through images daily; thus, educational settings should consider this topic in class. This paper presents the results of a pedagogical intervention aimed at creating awareness about the importance of visual literacy in a group of English pre-service teachers. The researcher applied a pedagogical intervention to promote awareness among students about (VL) through the reading of advertisements. Advertisements are visual tools, which reach the attention of the audience through rhetorical figures. Likewise, advertisements might have hidden ideologies, which influence people’s behaviors. The participants were able to read some advertisements through the spiral method. The teacher collected data from the pedagogical intervention using students´ diaries, surveys, interviews, and artifacts elaborated by the students. The results reveal that students at the beginning of the intervention considered they knew how to read images; however, their mindsets changed about reading an image; students recognized that reading images, especially advertisements, takes time and they need to question what they are observing to reveal the hidden messages on them. The recommendations indicate that advertisements offer deep content; therefore, they could be a good tool to fostervisual literacy in the field of TEFL.