Community-based explorations and visual literacies: A key interplay to enhance writing skills in early high school students

This paper presents the outcomes and findings of a qualitative study aimed to describe the effects of combining visual literacies with Community-Based Pedagogies (CBP) to enhance writing skills in early high school learners. The data was gathered through community mapping reports, a needs analysis instrument, students’ artifacts, a focus group, and teacher's field notes. This action research revealed how students, through systematic and consistent work, were smoothly guided in the writing process with the help of visual elements that served as triggers or supporters to produce short texts in which their voices were relevant by exploring their context and portraying their realities. The triangulation of the different instruments within the grounded analysis (Saunders et al., 2012), indicated a rise in the students’ quantity and quality of the writing production in the foreign language and a learners' genuine interest in writing assuming an active role. Based on the available findings, they contribute significantly to nurturing English language teaching practices in public schools by boosting students’ writing skills through the cognizant use of information about the surrounding contexts combined with visual stimuli as a valuable source.