วารสารวิทยาลัยบัณฑิตเอเซีย ...

Students nowadays are highly visual. Still pictures, films, paintings, drawings, virtual educational games, and others accompany many students’ classroom reports and presentations. Teachers, too, have to cope with this growing interest of students in order to sustain their attention in the classroom. The proliferation of these various visual materials eventually changed what it means to be literate in our modern world. This paper explores the level of Visual Literacy Skills of students enrolled in a writing class and their thought organization in analyzing the picture shown. The students were asked to write an essay interpreting a photo showing different kinds of clocks. Forty papers were randomly selected and were assessed for the students’ visual literacy skills. Findings show that majority of the respondents failed to interpret what was seen in the picture. For the few students who attempted to interpret the photo, the highest percentage settled on the literal level of interpretation, followed by the critical level, the inferential level, and creative level. It was also found that the thought organization of the students in writing their essays start from their schema about ‘time’ before focusing on the photo in which their interpretation goes from concrete to abstract. Implications and pertinent recommendations about the possible inclusion of Visual Literacy Instruction in the Language Curriculum conclude the paper.