Main principles of using visual aids in the classroom

2.2 Designing visual aids for ESL materials
In designing visual aids for ESL materials, teachers play a number of roles, including:
• Initiator: A teacher has responsibility for setting up visual aids in teaching
materials.
• Planner: A teacher has a role in preparing for visual aids.
• Analyst: A teacher is responsible for weighing whether particular visual aids can cater to students’ needs and instructional needs.
• Maker: A teacher is in charge of developing, compiling, and arranging visual aids for her or his teaching materials.
• User: A teacher is responsible for piloting visual aids alongside teaching materials in the classroom.
• Evaluator: A teacher has responsibility for assessing the effectiveness of visual aids for the visual aids improvement.
There are some steps for designing visual aids for ESL materials that teachers may follow.
1. Planning visual aids embraces these activities: envisioning what to reach, analyzing a current teaching-learning context, and conceptualizing what to do.
Envisioning what to teach allows teachers to identify the ideal characteristics of visual aids they should design. Analyzing a current teaching context helps teachers gather relevant information about students, materials, and possible visual aids. Conceptualizing what to do enables teachers to consider possible goals and ways to develop visual aids.
To start with, envisioning allows teachers to make a stance of what they mean by “effective visual aids.” Visual aids are sort of medium for better teaching and learning process. It is also important to remember that visual aids are not the teaching materials, thus should not be used to replace the roles of teaching materials. However, visual aids can make teaching materials easy or understandable to students. Therefore, it is important to figure out what means by “effective” in order to know where to go in planning visual aids.¹⁰
In general, effective visual aids offer a wide range of benefits, including:


a. Attract and maintain student interest in learning the materials
The use of visual aids in ESL should improve teaching-learning atmospheres, and in turn arouse student interest and willingness to learn the given materials. This impact can be achieved by the first impression of physical appearance of visual aids. For example, in a speaking class, when describing things to young learners, a teacher can show them a series of good looking pictures. In this way, a teacher can firstly, focus their attention on thinking about the pictures and stimulate effective interactions not only for pre-learning activities, but also for whilst-learning activities (e.g., working with the pictures) and post-learning tasks (e.g., drawing a conclusion from expressions used in describing things).
b. Help students understand the materials easily
When a teacher teaches English with effective visual aids, students will be urged to comprehend the materials given. In teaching grammar, for example, explaining “comparatives and superlatives” without visual aids will take more words and time for the students to arrive at solid understanding of the concepts. On the contrary, pictures of compared objects on properly arranged tasks will make teacher explanation easy to grasp. In short, the teacher’s verbal presentation accompanied with visualization is definitely more effective in helping students understand the materials.
c. Illuminate complicated teaching materials
The application of visual aids in the classroom is also essential for lighting up difficult and intricate concepts. Explaining “future perfect tense”; one of the tenses considered difficult by Indonesian learners, can be very frustrating for a teacher. The sentence “We will have finished the assignment tomorrow at 9.”, for instance, is usually associated with modal construction “We can/must finish the assignment tomorrow at 9.”, or simple future “We will finish the assignment tomorrow at 9.” However, the use of charts, tables or schemes can help a teacher clarify and discriminate those concepts efficiently.
d. Allow the students to endure retention
Effective visual aids construe various learning strategies. The teaching and learning process in English classes frequently remains a gap between teacher’s teaching methods and learners’ learning styles. A teacher, in this respect, has to bridge the gap so as to create an effective English class. Using visual aids helps teachers do so. Visual aids enable a teacher to do more creativity in a class so as to meet different student learning styles. A teacher can put up such memory-friendly class activities as visually-based inputs incorporated with task-based and collaborative teaching. The involvement of students in an English class that reflects such visually-based language instruction provides a great opportunity for them to learn the teaching materials better and result in longer retention of the materials. Further, in planning visual aids, teachers need to ponder the questions below.
Question Type A:
Who are learners?
• Who are the learners (e.g., age, background, and level)?
• What are the learners’ needs?
• How large is the class?
• Are the learners familiar with technology in classroom?
• To what extent can they understand and receive materials through particular types of visual media?
• What are the learners’ preferences of learning styles?
What kinds of visual aids will possibly suit the learner age or level of language proficiency?
Question Type B:
What to teach?
• What is the objective of the course?
• What skills are taught through the teaching materials?
• What components of English skills are to be taught (e.g., topics, vocabularies, or language functions)?
• What tasks and activities will be included in the teaching materials? In what sequence?
What kinds of visual aids are appropriate to the materials?
Question Type C:
What are possibilities of providing visual aids?
• What visual aids and media are possibly available?
• Is it necessary to adopt commercial visual media for class use?
• To what extent is the school/college capable of providing visual aids?
• How will the visual aids be provided?
• Who will provide the visual media?
• What are difficulties of probably providing the teaching aids?
• Is the teacher familiar to the technical issues in using the media?
What way to take?
5.2. Developing
In developing visual aids, there are three important factors teachers need to take into account in achieving visual aids efficacy; three of which include media selection, physical.¹¹
Media selection
Media refer to equipment or anything that can be used to teach English materials like whiteboard/blackboards, posters, transparency sheets, slides, computers, handouts, cards, videotapes, and even in wider meaning, class activities such as role-plays, games and other activities can be used as teaching media. In designing visually-based materials, the appropriateness between materials characteristics and media is vital. It is important for teachers to note that not all teaching media suit particular teaching materials. In other words, they have to consider what teaching media match certain teaching materials. For instance, teaching extensive reading to advanced level students using Power point presentation is effective when introducing a conceptual framework of reading skills. However, in training the students extensive reading skills, teachers need to use paper-based media (such as handouts) that consist of reading texts and tasks. Putting the reading texts into presentation slides will reduce the readability of visual aids. Therefore, employing various media in a class at the same time can enliven the class.

Physical Appearance
Physical appearance is not a substantial matter in teaching process but is important to support content delivery process in the classroom. As previously mentioned, one of the characteristics of effective visual aids is that visual media help teachers attract and focus the students’ attention to the teaching materials. This characteristic is possibly achieved through the development of excellent physical appearance, including size management, visual aids density, and color combination. The size, here, can refer to the size of words, texts, or objects included in the visual media, and can refer to the visual aids themselves. ¹²
Simply to say that the principle of visuals’ sizing is readability of the visual aids—the students will be able to see, read and decode any information delivered through the aids easily. To reach good readability, a teacher has to construct visual aids in accordance to class size, room capacity and room light intensity. Consequently, it is suggested that teachers pilot and test visual aids readability before using the aids in the classroom. Visual aids density is the extent of spaces among words/phrases or other objects included in visual aids. A teacher needs to keep her or his visual aids visible and comfortable to see. A poster of 60 x 70 cm consisting of a single picture of 10 x 10 cm in its middle is too passable to be an effective visual aid to teach a class of 30 students. Otherwise, a page of letter-sized handout with hundreds of words of a text in single line space and 1 cm of top, left, bottom and right margins is too impassable. Using different kinds of visual aids requires different standard of density setting. On handouts or textbooks, the teacher can include long texts with several pictures in proportional line spacing. But on slides or white/blackboard, long texts are not applicable (it is preferable to use the key points and several pictures/images/charts if necessary) and even create confusion.¹³
Teacher decision in coloring visual aids appropriately is also essential to keep them functioning well. Since the main function of visual aids is to deliver messages easily, coloring visual aids should not hinder learners from understanding the messages.
Some principles of designing colors are (CARE):
• Consistent: Consider using the same colors for parallel parts of materials on visual aids except for highlighting any points.
• Actual: Use the real colors of objects for images and photographs.
• Realistic: Use realistic color combination, not too many colors, and not merely for aesthetic purpose.
• Easy to read: Use eyes-friendly color combination, combinations which give comfortability for audiences to read and understand the messages. Dark colors (e.g., black, blue, red and green) of objects or texts on light backgrounds have noticeable impact and give better visual acuity (Pitner 2009). Alternatively, thecontrary is also working—light colors (e.g., white or light yellow) on dark
backgrounds. ¹⁴
Content Management
Since the substances of teaching materials are represented by content, the way a teacher organizes the content of visual aids does matter in designing visual aids. The first question to ask to the creator of visual aids before doing it is “Does she or he definitely understand the scope of materials for a unit of class meeting?” The quality of materials design, in this regard, will also affect how well a teacher organizes the content of her or his visual aids.
Therefore, some relevant questions teachers need to consider include:
• How does the teacher design the materials?
• What tasks and activities are included in the materials?
• How does the teacher design the tasks and activities?
• Which parts, tasks or activities of the teaching materials require visual aids?
• What visual media (e.g., texts, pictures, etc.) will suit the tasks and activities?
• How will the teacher make use of texts, pictures, and other objects as visual media?
It is believed that teacher understanding of ESL materials may not be a barrier to creating visual aids. Yet, teacher decision on how she or he controls the content of ESL materials matters in developing visual aids. Using different visual aids requires different ways of organization. In this case, it is important that the teacher direct the incorporation. Evaluation is done after visual aids are implemented. The main question of evaluating visual aids is “Were the visual aids effective to support the teaching-learning process?” It can be carried out by listing questions given to the students or the other teacher who was involved in the teaching-learning process. The evaluation result provides valuable information about the effectiveness of visual aids after being used in the classroom and helps a teacher enhance the visual aids for future instructional activity.¹⁵