Visual Literacy in Secondary EFL Education in China:A Semiotic Perspective

Human societies use a variety of semiotic modes for meaning construction.The ubiquity of images in today’s world,alone or in combination with other modes,makes competence with images or visual literacy a prerequisite of competence in life.Now identified as an essential literacy skill for 21st century learners in the digital age,visual literacy has been introduced into contemporary English curricula in a number of countries around the world.In China,the skill of viewing is added as one important component of language competence in National English Curriculum Standards for High School issued in 2017,thereby making the cultivation of visual literacy vital to secondary EFL education.This paper aims to present and discuss the current situation of visual literacy in secondary EFL education in China.It first provides an analysis of the ways of visual-verbal interplay for meaning construction in textbooks,and finds an uneven distribution of image-text relations in the current EFL textbooks,with a majority of images playing a supportive or illustrative role.Then it explicates the bi-dimensional three-level construct of visual literacy that is specified in the EFL curriculum,with which the subskills of visual literacy assessed in the latest large-scale EFL tests are compared,with a view to finding out the degree of correspondence between the subskills measured in the tests and the subskills expected in the curriculum.The result shows that only one dimension of reading visual texts is assessed,and the other dimension of writing visual texts is not evidenced.Finally suggestions are made for varied visual inputs,an expanded construct of visual literacy,and improvement of the washback effect of tests.