It is increasingly the case that many texts studied in English contain visual elements in addition to written and/or spoken language. Examples include graphic novels and a wide range of mass media texts such as films, television programs, advertising, propaganda posters, news photographs and web pages. In some syllabus documents, the term ‘multimodal’ is used to refer to such texts. Students can be taught to study the written or spoken elements of such texts using many of the same approaches used to teach purely written texts. But the visual elements require a different, although related, set of concepts and analytical tools. This chapter explains these concepts and tools, and offers suggestions for ways of incorporating visual texts in the English curriculum.
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