Coursebooks and Materials - Use of Visual Aids
The next idea we're going to consider is the use of visual aids and visual aids can include some examples such as real, objects, which we call realia, the use of pictures and photographs and also the use of models. So let's consider some of the ideas surrounding the use of visual aids. Well, why are they useful? Well, first of all the use of a visual aid can reduce teacher talk time. It's very much more simple just to show a real object than to try to describe it so that we could just ask the students ?what is this,? and they would say ?this is a pen,? rather than trying to actually describe it. Again if we were trying to show examples of fruit and vegetables rather than to try and describe them why not use an actual model and this is going to be much more visually stimulating than me trying to just actually describe them. One of the things that that additional visual information does, studies have shown that by seeing things it actually aids memory. Another thing that these visual aids can do is they can actually stimulate discussion by having some form of real object or photo etc. then we can actually stimulate a discussion in some way and they can actually be used to elicit language. An example might be the use of a photograph. So I might show my students a photograph, something like this, and make sure that they can understand what it is, elicit language surrounding possible scenarios from that photograph and so on and so forth. It is quite important however when you're using a photograph of this type that you make sure that it is big enough for everyone to see. You don't want an example like this where we say okay what do you think of this and there's so much information there that the students can't actually see what it is that you're referring to. So make sure that pictures can be seen by everyone and finally, in terms of the use of visual aids although we can buy certain objects and we can cut things out of magazines and newspapers and so on, lots of ideas that we can come up with for visual aids, we can actually make ourselves. So anything that you don't have, have a go at actually making it.
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