Photo-Booklets for English Language Learning: Incorporating Visual Communication into Early Childhood Teacher Preparation

Teachers can integrate discussion and writing about photographs into the early childhood curriculum to build speaking, reading, and writing skills in any language. Although little available research focuses on photography and early childhood education as related specifically to English Language Learners, several current teacher resources do focus on uses of photography in classrooms for young children. What is lacking, however, is substantial reference to the planned use of language along with image creation through photography for the language development of English Language Learners (ELLs) in the early childhood classroom. Teacher training, too, devotes insufficient attention to either visual literacy or visual communication. This article provides a discussion of the role of the visual in English language development as a basis for a sample photography project that can be incorporated into a course for pre-service teachers in methods of teaching ELLs. Pre-service teachers thus experience the project first-hand in terms of image creation and the planning of appropriate content, language, and visual literacy objectives. The resulting visual products then function as teaching resources themselves; however, effective visual learning for ELLs requires that teachers possess such an informed understanding of the techniques that structure and assist language development.