More than the mechanical recording of events, photography has the power to convey a mood or share our insights with others. It has the power to capture not only our perfect moments of love and happiness, but also searing images of cruelty and poverty. It has the power to preserve in a rectangular frame the beauty of a thousand sunsets, the joys of parents seeing their child just learning how to walk on its own, and the sublime happiness of students graduating after years of hard work and sacrifice.
Photographs (whether our own, those of others, or cut out from newspapers and magazines) can be a very effective way of teaching and learning the English language. Joep van der Werff, in his very informative article entitled “Using Pictures from Magazines” from The Internet TESL Journal, discusses how pictures can be a good source of material for practicing speaking, listening, writing, vocabulary and grammar. In this article, van der Werff relates the inspiring story of how one student overcame his shyness and reluctance to participate in the English class through an activity involving pictures.
In the right hand sidebar of this blog, you can see links to various resources on the Internet on the use of photographs in the teaching and learning of English.
We will be posting pictures in this blog on a regular basis. As a good way of learning how to write in English, you can write descriptions, narrations, dialogue, expositions, etc based on your thoughts and feelings about these pictures. For a good discussion on how to describe pictures, please read the article “Picture Description” from http://www.ego4u.com/.
If you are an ESL or EFL teacher, you have permission to use these pictures in your classroom activities. However, you cannot use these pictures for commercial purposes or post them in the Internet. Proper credits must also be given. Unless otherwise directed, please use this credit line: "Photo by Atty. Gerry T. Galacio; all rights reserved; used with permission."
Here's how you can use pictures and this blog to teach and learn the English language:
[1] You can compose short essays about any of the pictures we will be posting, e-mail them to us, and we will publish them in this blog. (You can also use the "Comments" form at the bottom portion of this post to send us your essays.)
[2] Other ESL and EFL teachers and students from around the world can then read your essays and give their comments on your grammar, coherence or unity of ideas, style of writing, and areas for improvement.
[3] We will just publish your essays without your name or e-mail address to protect your privacy and prevent spam. You can just give a general description about yourself like nickname, age or school level, gender, country, etc.
For example, you can write a description of your feelings as you look at the solitary branch against the sunset above. Write about the glorious sunsets in Boracay when you went there last summer. Write, for example, about how you felt, what you thought about as you and your family spent time together along the beach.
You can use the picture above of the guy up on a tree to learn how to write dialogue; notice that the girl with a white T-shirt is looking up at the guy, and there’s a heart-shaped piece of paper with the words “Happy Valentine” on the tree.
Nurture the “spark of divine fire” within you
Martha Foley’s short story “One With Shakespeare” chronicles a young girl’s exquisite discovery of her talent for writing. Through the encouragement of her high school teacher, the girl realizes that just like Shakespeare, she also had that creative potential, that “spark of the divine fire” as her teacher described the talent for writing. She begins to savor the emotions, the expressions, the ideas her words could bring forth. She begins to learn how to create memorable images in the mind’s eye through words. Looking out the windows of the library, she sees the flower filled trellis and her mind is filled with images of “black sentinels against the sky.”
Whatever your talent may be (photography or writing), nurture and share that spark of the divine fire within you.
Some pictures to start with ...
Okay, now that you know how this blog works, why don't you try out your writing skills with these pictures?
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Picture no. 05
