During a 10-week classroom-based study in a school in western Canada, 17 Kindergarten children had multiple opportunities to learn about how elements of visual art, design and layout in picturebook artwork are fundamental to meaning-making when transacting with this format of literature. Student application of learning about the concepts under…

Informed by a postmodern perspective on language, culture and visual art education this article examines what a creative, visual art focus can bring to the experience of language-and-culture learning for secondary-age students of Arabic as a heritage language (HL). It builds on our previous research focussing on student interactions with works by…

Research on young English language learners has been gaining popularity in recent years, but to this day remains underdeveloped. The present study aimed to add to this body of research by exploring the effects of visual arts activities implemented via comprehension and compared to more commonly used flashcard activities implemented via…

Purpose: Art forms such as music and drama are among some recognised tools used by educators. This has sparked interest in how art can be used in education, making it a fertile field for educational research. However, there is a missing connection in how drawing can be used as a tool for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students to learn about…

Believing teachers as agents who actively make meaning about their professional identities, we depict the construction of our identity as three mid-career female English language teachers. Anchored by collaborative autoethnography (CAE) and arts-based educational research (ABER) approaches, we explored and reflected on our lived critical…

The arts as a pedagogic medium can be an important tool for language learning, and yet many teachers avoid it, often because of a lack of confidence. The main purpose of this study was to explore the possibility of generalist educators, as opposed to art specialists, using the arts successfully as a cross-curricular tool to accelerate English…

Creative classroom constructions imbued with arts integration, a transmediational multimodal pedagogy, are examined in exploratory action research in three bilingual elementary classroom learning experiences. In each of the lessons, there was a whole-group introduction and small-group hands-on arts-based activities inclusive of peer dialoguing,…

University students are often expected to interpret and produce multimodal texts during their studies. However, their multimodal literacy is rarely developed explicitly and students often lack the language and the knowledge to talk and write about multimodal experiences. Such expectations demand knowledge and skills to approach multimodal texts in…

Educators have reported that incorporating the arts into the classroom can support foreign language (FL) learning. However, there is very little empirical evidence from the classroom to support this claim. This exploratory, quasi-experimental arts intervention study was conducted with native English speakers aged 12-13 years old as part of their…

Students learning English as an additional language (EAL) in Australian schools frequently struggle with the cultural and linguistic demands of the classroom while concurrently grappling with issues of identity and belonging. This article reports on an investigation of the role primary school visual arts programs, distinct programs with a…

Despite the vital role the artist statement plays within the art community, very little research has been done on its rhetorical organization and many artists face challenges when they are required to write one. The present study involves move analysis of a corpus of 69 artist statements written in English by professional visual artists with the…

In 1968 the Bilingual Education Act marked the first comprehensive federal intervention in the schooling of language minoritized students by creating financial incentives for bilingual education in an effort to address social and educational inequities created by poverty and linguistic isolation in schools. Since that time federal education…

This article describes a visit to the exhibition "CSÁTH The Death of the Magician" at the Petofi Literary Museum in Budapest in the context of a university course for pre-service teachers of English. The course itself focused on multimodal social semiotics and visual arts to equip students with confident knowledge and skills to use with…

This article reports on an initiative to enrich the German curriculum at all levels via "Climate Stories," a student-centered learning project that capitalizes on the encouraging strides being made in German-speaking countries to combat global climate change. Students identify a real-life "climate story" in the news in German…

During a classroom-based study, eight- to ten-year-old students had multiple opportunities to develop their knowledge and understanding about semiotic resources for meaning-making in picturebooks and graphic novels. Instruction during the study included a variety of activities that focussed on a selection of elements of visual art and design, and…