2.1.5. Pictures - the language learner's gold mine

Another twist can further extend the potential of TPR. Use pictures, either photos, or line drawings (or even video recordings) as the basis for communication. In the long run, pictures have far more potential than simple actions. Pictures make it possible to learn to talk about the whole range of daily activities and experiences. You can repeatedly use the same pictures to learn to understand sentences of a variety of patterns. Suppose that during your eighth language session you are focusing on learning to understood sentences which describe an ongoing process in past time. Each sentence begins, “When this picture was taken...” and goes on to say what was happening when the picture was taken. “When this picture was taken, this man was ploughing. When this picture was taken, this woman was making bread. When this picture was taken, this man was fixing a chair.” Etc. The LRP makes up these sentences on the fly. You have to process what you hear, and respond by indicating which picture she is describing. There are a hundred pictures (though only a few are in view at any given moment). The verbs themselves (ploughing, making, fixing, etc.) are not new to you, since you have been through these same pictures with the LRP many times. What is new is the form of the verbs used to describe an ongoing process in past time. By the time you get through the hundred pictures, you will have processed and responded to a hundred sentences which describe a past ongoing process. You'll be surprised how familiar you will have become with that sentence pattern.

While listening to a hundred sentences in a given form (and responding by pointing to the picture being described), you may get lazy, and not attend to the form of the sentence, but only catch one or two key words which are enough to allow you to respond. It may therefore be good to go through the pictures again, allowing the LRP to use two contrasting patterns. For example, she might use a pattern that begins “After this picture was taken-- ” along with the pattern beginning “When this picture was taken--”. Using two or three contrasting patterns will increase the chances that you thoroughly attend to and process what you hear.

There are many sources for pictures. You can clip them from local magazines, travel brochures or old National Geographic articles related to your host country or to neighboring countries. It is far better if you can take your own photos of local scenes. It may be that your LRP can help with this. On one occasion in Pakistan, my wife and I were able to take over a hundred photos (three rolls of film), capturing a wide variety of common daily activities, in the space of about two hours. It actually took longer to arrange the pictures into a good sequence and pasting them in the book took several hours!

For the early stages of language learning I recommend pictures with certain characteristics. Each picture has one or more people in it who are the central characters. In addition there are one or more inanimate objects which the person is using or doing something to. For example, the person may be using a hammer to build a table. Thus, in addition to the person, there is both a hammer and a table. Another person might be riding a bicycle. Another might be standing at a cash till. Two people might be simply sitting on a bench. The objects the people are involved with need not always be inanimate. Someone might be feeding an animal or nursing a baby. And it is not necessary that every single picture meet these criteria, but it is good if many of them do. I would consider having two or three identical sets of the pictures developed. Then I could glue one set in a notebook and have one or two sets loose. For different activities you might find it preferable to either use the pictures in a notebook or loose. Or you might want your co-learner and yourself to have the same pictures. For example, your co-learner might show a picture to the LRP from her set. The LRP then tells you something about the picture, and you respond by pointing to the same picture in your own set. Loose pictures can be manipulated and sorted. There are also advantages to the consistency of order and arrangement which a picture book provides.

A variety of commercial resources are also available. Harris Winitz has prepared a number of books of drawings for language learners aimed at highlighting specific vocabulary and sentence patterns. This series, Language Through Pictures, is available from the International Linguistics Corporation, 401 89th Street, Kansas City, MO, 64114. Both Longman and Oxford University Press publish books of pictures for language learners, grouped according to topics or settings, which they misleadingly call dictionaries. These are The Longman Photo Dictionary and The New Oxford Picture Dictionary. They are available in a number of major languages, but can easily be adapted to other languages, although they are based around Euro-American themes and settings for the most part. A variety of visual aids for language learners are available from Sky Oaks Productions, Box 1102, Los Gatos, California 95031.

Finally, at any point you can resort to drawing sketches, stick figures, or diagrams to use in a given language learning activity. I suspect that having the actual objects in hand is better than using sketches of them, but sketches are a whole lot better than merely using your mind's eye, since sketches still allow you to respond to what you process by pointing or by manipulating them. Without such aids it is hard to be sure you process what you hear. More importantly, these external aids are often what enables you to understand the language in the first place, so that you have a chance to process what you hear. If you can't process what you hear, it is of little use to you.

I will have many suggestions below regarding using pictures to highlight specific sentence patterns. A wide variety of sentence patterns can be highlighted by having the LRP take a pattern and use that pattern to make a comment about each picture in succession. In that way you will quickly hear and comprehend a hundred examples (if you have a hundred pictures) of a single sentence pattern. In addition to the examples I will give below in connection with specific sentence patterns, I have given a concise overview of this approach in Thomson (1989) . I suggest a slightly different approach in Thomson (1992). Both approaches assume the pictures you use are pasted in a book, and that you make repeated passes through the book with the LRP telling you things about the pictures on each pass. The two approaches differ mainly in the third pass through the book. On the first pass through the book the LRP teaches the words for human beings (man, woman, boy, girl, etc.). On the second pass the LRP teaches the words for the inanimate objects which the people are using or acting upon. On the third pass, in the first approach, the LRP uses a single verb repeatedly in describing every picture. The verb might be holding. The descriptions would then go, “This man is holding a hammer. This woman is holding a spatula. This child is holding a toy. (Etc.)” for perhaps a hundred pictures. (It may be necessary to use two or three verbs in some cases.) The point is to have the experience of comprehending a lot of sentences which contain subjects and objects (such as child and toy, respectively). The approach suggested in Thomson (1992) is a little less artificial. After talking about the humans on the first pass through the book and talking about the most salient objects on the second pass, the LRP simply makes what she feels is the most natural descriptive statement of what each person is doing on the third pass. Often, the learner will not understand what the LRP says on this pass, but the learner and LRP tape-record it all, and go over the tape together, discussing whatever the learner did not understand. I fluctuate as to which of these two approaches I prefer.