Abstract:

In the foreign language course, infographics have the potential to become a powerful visual literacy tool in the hands of the teacher. Their dissemination in the field of language teaching has both pedagogical and practical foundations. From a pedagogical perspective, infographics constitute a multimodal textual genre that trains students in digital reading, strengthening a skill in a world where printed text gradually transitions into digital representations, and enables teachers to target both language and digital skills. This aligns with the requirements of new curricula that focus on 21st century skills. Timelines are another tool that focuses on visual literacy and is widely used for educational purposes. It is a simple way of visually representing the relationship between people and events with historical periods and places. In this article, we will demonstrate how we pedagogically utilized infographics and timelines in a group of students, future French language teachers, enrolled in the Department of French Language and Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The application took place in a written expression course and followed the project-based learning method. The principles of flipped classroom were also employed, as the application occurred during distance learning due to the pandemic (March-June 2021). The authentic context was the presentation of historical events, the history of buildings, or individuals who glorified France abroad. In the end, students developed not only writing skills but also digital skills. In a questionnaire they completed at the end of the semester, they answered questions regarding the process, difficulties, searching for digital sources, collaboration, and their personal and linguistic improvement through creating infographics and timelines in the foreign language written expression course.

Keywords:

Written skills, infographics/timeline, teaching, foreign languages, French language.