Advances in communication and information technologies have facilitated an
increasing production, dissemination and consume use of a variety of multimodal
texts (MT), challenging the reign of language as the main mode of communication. In
the educational field, this challenge questions as to what it means to be literate in the
21st century and emphasizes the role of education in forming the reader-viewer
(SERAFINI, 2012), who do not only focus on the verbal mode, but constructs
meanings by integrating verbal and visual information to consolidate them into
communicative events. Grounded on Social Semiotics (HODGE, KRESS, 1998, VAN
LEEUWEN, 2005), Multimodality (KRESS, 2010, JEWITT, 2009, 2013, CALLOW,
2013, KRESS, VAN LEEUWEN, 2001, as well as on theories that discuss
multiliteracies (NEW LONDON GROUP, 1996, ANSTEY, BULL, 2006, COPE,
KALANTZIS, 2009), visual literacy (OLIVEIRA, 2006, SERAFINI, 2014, CALLOW,
2005, 2008) and viewing as a communicative skill (CALLOW, 2012, 2013; WALSH,
2011), among others, this research is aimed at investigating the integration of
viewing and linguistics skills, particularly reading, by indicating Kress and van
Leeuwen’s Grammar of Visual Design (GVD) potential as a tool to analyze printed
MT, and also by observing how readers construct meaning of MT and become aware
of their own visual literacy as they are presented to that Grammar in a higher
education context of English teaching training at a State of Piauí Higher Education
Institution. The proposal for integrating those skills was carried out as a pedagogical
intervention in the form of a reading workshop attended by eight Federal University of
Piauí students majoring in English, who were enrolled in an intensive reading course
taught in the second term of 2015 (October, 2015 to March, 2016). In a combination
of theory and practice, the participants were introduced to the GVD and performed
reading activities that include different multimodal genres. Six examples of these
texts and the participants' answers to two survey questionnaires and fourteen reading
activities constitute the corpus of the present research which, in accordance with a
intervention research methodology, adopted qualitative criteria for data analysis. The
analysis of the results indicated that the adoption of the GVD ideas by the
participants influenced their making/meanings of different modes and use of semiotic
resources in reading CMs. Therefore, it confirms the GVD potential for facilitating a
multimodal reading, configuring it as a metalanguage to help develop students' visual
literacy by integrating reading and viewing skills and revealing the emergence of
more critical readers who have become aware of their visual literacy. The present
thesis concludes with a reflection on the pedagogical implications of the results
achieved for English language teaching, defending the teaching of the GVD as a
metalanguage that favors the development of students visual literacy by integrating
viewing and language skills, and emphasizing the need for this language curriculum
to be rethought so as to include pedagogical practices such as those carried out in
this experiment. In addition to suggestions for future research, this work emphasizes
the need for training the reader-viewer on all levels of education but particularly on
the level of higher education and of teacher training courses.
Keywords: Multimodality. Visual Literacy. The Grammar of Visual Design.
