Picture-Based Interaction: A Tool for Enhancing Language Acquisition

Highlights:

• Picture-based interactions are an easy way to introduce students to the lessons of the textbook, and it helps them familiarize themselves with the topic.
• It enables students to generate descriptions—first orally, then by reading it out, and finally by writing down their own versions.
• The students get an opportunity to think and generate ideas in groups and express them.

Objective:

To introduce the process of picture-based interaction and show how it helps children to generate the descriptions of pictures displayed to them.

Introduction:

Pictures are a very powerful medium for interacting with the children as is exemplified in our CBSE textbook lessons, which are extensively illustrated. Picture-based interaction provides an easy entry into the text. Not only does it familiarize the learners with the theme, but it also enables them to easily comprehend the narrative that is presented. It helps students to identify and name familiar objects in English, resulting in the students being able to generate descriptions without facing any difficulty.

The process of picture-based interaction:

• Display a picture to the whole class by pasting it on the black board.
• Help the students to identify the characters/objects in the picture. Then go on to familiarize them with the actions that are taking place. Following this, helping the students form opinions about the images in the picture.

• The interactive questions given below can be asked to the students in order to facilitate this process:
  • Who are there in the picture?
  • What do you see in the picture?
  • What are the people and the animals doing?
  • Where is the action taking place?
  • What do you think are the occupations of these people?
  • What do you think about these people’s feelings towards animals?
• Elicit responses to all these interactive questions from the students and write them down on the black board. As each sentence is written, read it aloud with the help of a pointer. After this is done, the students can be called up in small teams to read the sentences.

• Discuss and sequence the sentences elicited from the students and number them accordingly—we now get a picture description. Finally, provide an appropriate title to the description.
• Ask the students to write down the sentences in their notebook without numbers, i.e., continuously, like in a paragraph from the textbook.
• Divide the students into small groups. Give another picture to each group and ask them to write a description of the picture using the above method.
• While the students write their descriptions, move around the groups and check whether they are following the instructions properly.

• Once the group work is done, ask the groups to present their description on a chart and display it for the class to see.
• Present your own version, i.e. the teacher’s version, of the description on the same picture and discuss about descriptions presented in the displayed charts.

Teacher: Gayathri S, GPS Thattanchavady