Should We Teach Graphicacy?

Tim Shanahan

Okay, okay… “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Reading teachers know the relationship between words and pictures is a lot more complicated than that.

Research, for instance, has shown repeatedly that when you’re trying to teach kids to read a word, it is best to ditch the pictures. Word learning requires that attention be focused on the sequence of letters, not the accompanying photo or drawing. Those are just distractions.

Another problem with pictures and words is that when kids have trouble with some words in a text, they may try to depend on the picture context. The pictures may give the reader a way around the reading. Illustrations may even allow some kids to slip through the cracks, allowing them to answer comprehension questions without any grasp of the words.

Young kids often conclude that book-sharing parents or teachers are making the stories up from the pictures. They’re surprised to discover that while they were examining the art, the adult was reading the squiggles.

We seek ways to teach kids to ignore the pictures for the words.

Yep, pictures can be a problem for beginning readers. If things go well, students come to rely less and less on pictures.

What about informational texts, like science books? Now that’s a horse with an entirely different pigmentation.

With science texts this progression goes in the opposite direction. In the primary grades, science graphics are like what one finds in storybooks – illustrations there to motivate or to restate the words.

Science graphics don’t fade away. They get superseded by scientific graphics aimed at supplementing and extending the textual information rather than replacing it. (Glossy high school textbooks are sometimes an exception to this. Those graphics may be more about decoration than information – a complaint of both science and history teachers).

It is fair to say that for a lot of academic reading, graphics are of central importance. Students who can’t make sense of them are at a real reading comprehension disadvantage. Understanding content text requires a reliance on graphics, not to help with the comprehension of the words, but to provide readers with a complete understanding.

A scientist once explained to me that science works that way because it describes natural concepts, relationships, and processes and that language is ill fitting for this purpose. Consequently, scientists try to describe these things in multiple ways – in words, graphics, and mathematically. They are all imperfect representations, of course, but together they provide the most complete and accurate rendition of the information.

That only works if readers can make sense of words and graphics. My experiences with high school science students tells me they have no idea how to read graphics. If referred for reading help – they may have trouble with both words and graphics – the reading teacher focuses on the former alone (and the science teacher stops using the textbook altogether).

There are whole books written on this topic (Roth, Pozzer-Ardenghi, and Han, 2005) and there is more to teaching graphics reading than I can provide in a blog entry. But there should be enough room for me to offer some basic recommendations that may benefit your students. You might dismiss this, waving it away as not being your responsibility – reading teachers teach kids to read written words.

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