Visual Rhetoric

 

Instruction by images is powerful in language learning. Images have the power to convey messages, or help convey messages when text can not. According to Giaschi in his article “Gender Positioning in Education”, Images in ESL textbooks moved from 100-1,000 billion in 1985to 250 million-1.3 billion ten years later. It is suggested that this may because visual rhetoric has become much more understood. These images, like recent language learning systems, converse not only through text, but also through these images. However the role of visual rhetoric in such texts, according to Giaschi, has tended to be stereotypical to ‘Western culture’. Giaschi proposed that western produced textbooks tend to be ethnocentric and contain images that depict “women as possessions and men as a thing to envy”. The images also convey economic, and political influences. For a person who is not familiar to a ‘culture’, these images may support a stereotype that is not beneficial for the learner.

According to Giaschi article, Fairclough states that although his focus is on the verbal element in communication, visual images play an increasing role in a modem society's communicative life: "very often visuals and 'verbals' operate in a mutually reinforcing way which makes them very difficult to disentangle". Gisachi offers a few questions to disentangle the rhetoric for the reader. They are stated as,

 

 1. What is the activity of the image(s)?

2. Who is active (the "protagonist") in the image?

3. Who is passive (the "receiver") in the image(s)?

4. Who has status in the image(s)?

5. What does the body language communicate?

6. What does the clothing communicate?

7. Where are the eyes directed?

 

Each of these seven questions has a specific purpose letting the reader acknowledge and understand the visual rhetoric of the photo. It was found that most of the time, as stated before, men were depicted as a thing to envy and as the dominant protagonist, and women were depicted as a thing of desire and as the receiver.

           In Mendes article, “Construction of Racial Stereotypes in English as a foreign Language”,  this idea is also supported. However he go beyond gender roles and into power issues of the West. He stated that in most visual representations of ‘bad’ it was a foreign image, where is something was depicted to be beautiful or ‘good’ the image was constructed of something American.

            It is important for an educator to understand these visual rhetoric issues to initiate discussion and ask questions to the learners and make them aware of the discrepancies of the visual rhetoric. Images are able to speak past the expressive ability of text, and because of this what they are communicating needs to be fully understood.