Learners’ drawing as connected with writing: Implications for ELT pedagogy and materials design'

This article reports a research project that i conducted on the role and nature of drawing as a self-expression tool among teenaged English learners in China and Thailand. Empirical work regarding how drawing affects English language learning focuses on both linguistic forms and social meaning, ranging from vocabulary retention (Hendricks, 2005; Altun, 2015) to generation of ideas (Adonous, 2015) among L2 learners. However, such ELT research on learners' drawings is minimal compared to the sizable quantity of studies on this theme in psychology, anthropology and social education. By and larger, it remains fairly uncommon to see rigorous attempts to connect the outcome of research using visual stimuli with the need to improve classroom pedagogy in any discipline. As a visual artist and TESOL educator, I am particularly interested in understanding learners' ability to express themselves in drawing pictures and how that ability compares with their writing ability in terms of richness in content, reasoning skills and communicative functions. Based on that, I am also making effort to draw theoretical implications from data for enhancing ELT methodology and materials design.