Visual Composition and Language Development

This paper presents a visual literacy approach for improving verbal development. Organized slide stories called visual compositions are shown to be a compelling media tool for visual/verbal interaction in the classroom. A model is presented showing that six levels or stages of literacy development are achieved with the use of each slide story. The initial and final stages indicate the teacher's role: involving students in viewing the same visual experience and then helping them share, edit, and react to each other's written compositions that were written about the visual theme. The four middle levels of the model represent the verbal and nonverbal processing modes achieved by each student through viewing, imagining, composing, and writing. The visual composition approach essentially stimulates language and ideas while providing an organizing strategy for written paragraph development. The strength of the visual involvement is that it provides a procedure for language discovery while achieving cooperation between the visual/ spatial, holistic mode of right brain processing and the analytic, sequential mode of left brain processing. The right brain encourages the formation of images, impressions, and feelings about the pictorial story while the left brain consciously works on the words and sentences that capture those meanings. Motivation and stimulation to write and. to read are provided by the visual composition approach.