Visual teaching method: painting

  As you know the generation of pupils is the most visually stimulated generation that teachers have ever had to teach. According to research, 65% of our pupils are visual learners, because they are grown up with TV, video games and the Internet. So it’s some kind of challenge for teachers to prepare them for the world in which they will live and work. I want to continue me subject about innovative methods and technologies in teaching English. So, I’d like to present you the visual teaching method – painting.

     Firstly, I rub up your knowledge of some terms. Method is a tool for teaching English or other language, while as a visual method is used in the learning process to develop pupils’ verbal and writing skills. The visual method is included illustrative method that involves pictures, tables, photographs, maps etc.

   Now let’s get back to my title. I want to lay the emphasis to painting. How can teachers use it for the classroom? Painting as a visual method provides an opportunity to enlarge pupils’ scope in the field of fine arts (learners can get acquainted with art galleries, museums, masterpieces of world art, famous artists biographies and their creative works from different periods), but also makes the lesson fun and effective. As a result, pupils not only command a vocabulary, but also they give a description of paintings by artists, master the skills of literary translation, learn to distinguish between genres and directions in art and talk about it in English.

Surely, there are lots of activities, working with pictures/paintings, but I recommend you the following tasks:

1.     Speaking.

-         It is the most appropriate activity, so as example use a fierce discussion about paintings of a Russian painter Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi such as “Unknown Woman” (1883) and “Inconsolable grief” (1884). And this raises the question of whether in these portraits of women we see the antipodes images.

           


-         Answers to questions about some painting

-         Research work: PowerPoint presentations, speeches.

To my mind, the research into the Pre-Raphaelites period promotes a vivid interest among pupils. Because the Pre-Raphaelites, founded in 1848, accepted the concepts of  history painting and mimesis, imitation of nature, as central to the purpose of art. Discussions and presentations of the most prominent members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement make your lesson poetical and elevated. Don’t forget to mention such great men as William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, Arthur Hughes, Walter Crane, John William Waterhouse.

2.     Vocabulary instruction

     Indeed, learning new words can be studied at landscape paintings. I think that a painting of the interior genre should be used to revise the topic “My apartment” in junior classes. A British artist Charlotte Mann has impressed me in the field of interior design. She draws room installations, created with bold black markers on a white ground. The delightful effect is essentially one of being inside a large pen and ink drawing. Charlotte draws on the walls of invented details, furniture, plants, and even pets.

     So I want to hit over the fence that art education is not the main task of English teachers, but conversance with the masterpieces of world art plays prominently in studying the culture of the country and stimulates the learning of language.


Thus, teach your pupils well!