Visual Approaches to Teaching Writing

Why are visual approaches to literacy important? Children′s reading and writing worlds are informed by multiple resources, combining different modes of communication and including speech or sound, still or moving images, writing and gesture.

Visual Approaches to Teaching Writing helps teachers understand how to include multimodal approaches in writing instruction. This practical guide reviews multimodal text design and the relationships between texts and images, and demonstrates how to build a supportive classroom environment for analyzing visual and audiovisual texts. A valuable resource for primary teachers, literacy specialists, and preservice teachers, this text shows educators how to:

• Plan a teaching sequence leading to specific writing outcomes
• Use sample teaching sequences for developing work on narrative, non-fiction, and poetry content
• Apply formative and summative assessments of multimodal texts for judging student development
• Write, review and carry out a whole-school policy for teaching multimodal writing

The accompanying CD-ROM contains a range of examples of children′s work, along with electronic versions of the activities, reproducibles, and material designed for use with interactive whiteboards.

She is a Past President of the Association and has recently retired from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education where her interests in research and publication were mostly concerned with multimodal texts.