A Sample from My new Book: Reading the Visual
Visual Literacy Because the centuries old domination of written language texts is being challenged by the rise in importance of the visual image, a focus on visual literacy has come to the fore in literacy research and instruction. Mitchell (1994) has described a pictorial turn , a complexly related transformation occurring across fields of inquiry, asserting visual images are not fully explicable based on linguistic models of written language. His pictorial turn established the fields of visual culture and visual studies as legitimate academic disciplines concerned with multimodality and other hybrid forms of communication. Avgerinou (2009) labels the pervasiveness of visual images in the mass media as the Bain d’Images Era , or era of the image bath, referring to the inundation of visual images in contemporary environments. She warns, however, th...