This article is translated from the Chinese version here.
In Chinese immersion teaching, pictures are often used to achieve teaching purposes. This method encourages students to make predictions about the outcome of a story, builds up their motivation and enables them to make personal connections to the story. This type of teaching is often referred to as Picture Walk.
The Picture Walk method is particularly useful for storytelling, where you can display the cover of the book and pictures inside before reading the story. Why do teachers like to use this teaching method? Because Picture Walk can help to:
The Picture Walk method can help to improve students’ skills in areas such as: painting closer attention to details, creating word maps, predicting stories and their outcomes, improving their listening comprehension, increasing speaking confidence, identifying story structure, analysing problems and thinking critically about the message in the story. A more thorough list of outcomes can be found in this article.
Before beginning the story, use pictures as background links to arouse interest in students.
When I used to teach, I always used pictures as supplementary material, overlooking their importance as a starting point for imagination and creativity. It wasn’t until I had children that I learned the power that pictures have to build comprehension. There are so many angles that a picture can be viewed from, details that can be studied, and topics that can be extended all from a single picture. For children, a picture says more to them than a thousand words ever could.
In addition to in-story and in-class content, pictures can easily be used to create spoken topics. For instance, what type of clothes are the people in the picture wearing? What do they look like? How do you feel when you look at the picture? Why is this? What do you think happens next?
Here is a picture where you can ask a very wide variety of questions to practice speaking. For example, here’s a table of the different categories of questions that can be asked from a picture:
Narrating | Justifying | Predicting | Personal Connection | About The Format |
Which types of people or things do you see? How many boys are there? How many girls are there? What are they doing? What clothes are they wearing? What do you think is happening in the picture? | Who do you think they are? What do you think they are talking about? What is the weather or season? How do you know? What time do you think it is? Why? Is it quiet or noisy? How do you know? Do the girls like this noisy environment? Do you think this boy can see the girls? Are these people sad or happy? How do you know? Why do girls and boys play different games? | Do the boys catch the ball? What do you think will happen next? What will the person on the phone say? Where is this chicken going? What do you think happens at the end? | Is this the same in your school? Do you also play these games? Tell me about the difference between the games you like to play and these games? If you were here what would you want to do? What personal experience does this image remind you of? | Where is it possible that we see this image? Who could have made this image? Why? What kind of picture is this? What is the purpose of this image? |
For example, this is a holiday book for a story in the Mandarin Matrix Proficiency Builders series. The following images are taken from the cover and the first four pages of the book.
This article proposes more detailed techniques, click to read more. These tips include: starting with the cover, looking at the pictures in order, not focusing on the text, associating vocabulary with pictures, associating pictures with real life, encouraging prediction and inference, not showing the ending of the story, and asking students to tell stories
Using this book as an example, we can start by asking questions about the cover of the book; letting students observe details in the picture, and then predicting the theme, plot of the book, and imagining what they think will happen in the story.
Moving through the first four pages of the book, we can encourage students to form deeper observations, ask further questions and make predictions about what will happen next. For instance:
“What are they doing in the picture? What’s around? What do you think happens next?”
We can also create some suspense… “The bugs have eaten something, what should they do?”
From here, we can import vocabulary that from topics that students are already familiar with; swimming, vacation, picnics, etc. This way, they can begin to make connections between the pictures and the vocabulary instead of relying on memorisation alone.
With the same few pictures, ignoring the text and actual story, what questions can we ask to promote speaking? You can modify the questions from the table below to the images you are using.
Narrating | Justifying | Predicting | Personal Connecting | About The Format |
What do you see in the picture? How many boys are there? How many girls are there? What are they doing? What clothes are they wearing? What do you think is happening in the picture?
| Who do you think they are? What do you think they are talking about? What is the weather or season? How do you know? What time do you think it is? Why? Is it quiet or noisy? How do you know? Do the girls like what they’re doing? Do you think they can see what the dog is doing? Are these people sad or happy? How do you know? Why do dogs do this? | Do dogs jump into the water? What do you think will happen next? Is there anyone next to the pool? What will be said? Where is this boy going? Why? What happens at the end? | Do you have these things in your home too? Do you also play these games? Tell me about the difference between the games you like to play and these games? If you went to this place later, what would you want to do? What personal experience does this image remind you of? | Where is it possible that we see this image? Who could have made this image? Why? What kind of picture is this? What is the purpose of this image? |
The article above is about a teacher sharing their experience with Picture Walk and Picture Prompts. Happy teaching everyone!
Storybooks mentioned are all original content created by the Mandarin Matrix team. Mandarin Matrix is a leading provider of immersive Chinese learning material based on pedagogically strong foundations. Please fill out this form to request a sample book or a free trial online account.
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