Development and validation of an English teachers’ visual literacy scale for smartphone photography grounded in social semiotic theory

Abstract

Abstract Smartphones and the literacy to harness the educational affordances of photographs currently rest on the bedrock of second language (L2) education. Building on social semiotic theory, this study developed and validated a visual literacy scale for smartphone photography (VLS4SP). Despite the importance of visuals and smartphones, no valid scale is available in the domain of English language teaching (ELT) to measure L2 teachers’ VL. In developing and validating the new VLS4SP, initially, some items were generated and tested for validity. Second, the scale was tested through rigorous psychometric analyses. The results of structural equation modeling (SEM) suggested the existence of 28 items that represent the established conceptualization of VL in the literature and the three areas of meaning metafunctions in the social semiotic theory: representational, interactive, and compositional. Overall, the study tapped upon two crucial technological and literacy factors in ELT which paves the way for further research and the applications of the scale in ELT.

Keywords

• VLS4SP
• Visual literacy
• Social semiotics theory
• Smartphone photography
• ELT