Main principles of using visual aids in the classroom

Reasons for incorporating visual aids into ESL materials

The use of visual aids in ESL materials is helpful in a way that students’ understanding of the teaching materials is significantly increased whenever proper visual aids are used. As learning activity deals with internal processes inside the students’ mind, a prominent reason of using visual aids is that they can stimulate the brain’s work and endure the students’ retention of subjects given or learned. Regarding the difference and uniqueness of learners’ characteristics and styles of learning, the use of creative and various appropriate visual aids can bridge a gap between the expected ideal roles of visualization conception in teaching and the learners’ psychological condition in learning. The use of visual aids also mediates a match between teacher’s teaching styles and students’ learning styles. Studies in this issue have raised a relevant case that a mismatch between teacher teaching styles and students’ learning styles frequently decreases the effectiveness of teaching and learning process.
Felder and Henriques, in this respect, suggest that the use of visual aids should be one of the effective ways to accommodate the difference between teacher’s teaching styles and students’ learning styles. Learning without context is meaningless. ³
Visual aids like photos, pictures, or stick figures provide context or situation to bring the students to reality of learning and to reinforce the tasks and activities. For example, the picture of “a port” can help learners figure out the place and situation, and identify people, things and activities in such a situation. The picture of the port visualizes the real context to the learners and stimulates them “to talk about” and “talk with.” Without the picture, a teacher faces difficulties in helping the learners learn vocabularies and encourage them to communicatively engage in the classroom tasks and activities using the situation of the port, for instance.
Learning English involves two types of materials; that is, systemic and schematic components. Systemic knowledge refers to the nature of English in terms of syntactic and semantic features of it. These features are frequently abundant in ESL materials presented verbally through learning tasks. However, in some degree of difficulty, learners learn best when the materials are visually presented. On the other hand, schematic knowledge comprised of cultural input, is difficult to present verbally. Visual aids, in this case, are essential media of clarifying, illustrating and visualizing cultural values. Given the important roles of visual aids above, I argue that English teachers need to make use of appropriate visual aids for the learners for particular learning tasks or activities in that such visual aids facilitate learners in performing such learning tasks easily. More importantly, the use of visual aids can help learners visualize ideas or connect what they are seeing to what they have experienced (background knowledge or experience).
Visual aids are not the teaching materials but they greatly contribute to the increase of students’ understanding of the teaching materials. There are two ironies English teachers should evade. Firstly, the advantage of visual aids is possibly admired exaggeratedly that may lead to over-treatment of their preparation, development and application. A teacher tends to spend too much time, energy, and thought in preparing for “too exclusive” and “too fashionable” visual aids that may merely attract student interest in the visual aids without taking into account the fact that such media have impact on student target language or competence acquisition or development.
On the other hand, the content of teaching materials (e.g., the English skills) is definitely prioritized regardless of how the teaching materials become more comprehensible and attractive. The content of teaching materials is seen as important to student acquisition on which teachers have to focus. Yet, “profound” teaching materials are sometimes given to the students in such an awkward way that they frequently feel discouraged to engage in the teaching materials.
Both ideas above do not support, and definitely detract the implementation of student centered materials and therefore can trivialize the teaching and learning process to some degree that weakens the achievement of teaching goals. In this case, the content of teaching materials and media need to be seen as interconnected elements of teaching process. For this reason, teachers should not dichotomize the teaching materials and aids.
Thus, it is a good idea for teachers to elaborate “what to teach” (the teaching content) and “how to deliver it” (the methods or media) proportionally to achieve particular instructional goals and objectives.⁴