ELF and visual literacy: Non-prescriptive writing triggered by wordless picturebooks

Katerina Karavia & Christine Calfoglou

While ELF awareness has given rise to the “perception of the English language learner as an efficient user of English in their own right” (Sifakis, 2019, p.3), this idea remains largely unexplored in the area of writing. This article aims to contribute to this largely neglected area of ELF-aware writing instruction and explore whether wordless picturebooks could serve as a useful writing instruction tool in an ELF-aware context. The lack of words may free learners from the anxiety caused by their struggle with the verbal content of reading input used as a trigger for writing and urge them to act as authors, ‘efficient users’, rather than learners, diverting attention from correctness to intelligibility, a key ELF concept (Reithofer, 2020). In comparing data obtained from young EFL learners taught writing through picturebooks with text with wordless picturebook writing instruction data, we hypothesise increased motivation levels in the non-prescriptive, non-threatening environment of the latter along with a more marked presence of authorial voice, both of which gain support from our findings. As another ‘lingua franca’, visual literacy, we argue, could be extended to more age-groups within an inclusive multimodal, multimedial, multilingual ELF perspective.

Key words: ELF-aware writing instruction; visual literacy; motivation; authorial voice; wordless picturebooks