Photographs provide a valuable resource in developing students' language skills whether those students are English, English as Second Language, or World Language students. Pictures provide a solid structure for students as they develop their skills; the largest collection of digital pictures to use in the classroom comes from Flickr.

Vocabulary

Students need to have a good vocabulary in order to speak and write. A language teacher, can select an image from Flickr about a location such as a living room; she searches for “living room,” clicks on “advanced search,” looks at the bottom of the screen, clicks on “Only search within Creative Common License” and clicks on “Find content to modify,” and clicks on “Search” again. She can copy the link to the picture into a word processing document or she can download the image. In class, she opens the document as she uses the photo for vocabulary identification. The teacher can have a “living room” vocabulary list for the students as they identify the objects in the photograph. Also, students can identify all the objects from a picture without a vocabulary list. They can identify opposites in the photo such as “Tall...short.” In addition, when the learners type a word such as “school”or the word in the world language such as “escuela” in the Flickr third party program of Tagnautic, they will see words that are related in some way. The students can mentally sort and organize these words into categories such as people in a school, things taught in a school, types of schools, etc.

Listening Activities

All language state assessments have a listening comprehension component in which students are to listen and then respond to what has been said. They may have to agree or disagree and tell why or they may have to answer questions about what was said. After a teacher finds a photo such as a restaurant, he describes certain things from the picture while the students listen; they then have to respond. He starts with basic statements about the visuals such as “There are three people at the table” or “The man with a black shirt is sitting alone,” and the students indicate if the statements are true or not. In another listening exercise, this teacher uses the photo to make inferences about the scene such as “The girl wears shorts; the temperature is hot,” and he has the students agree or disagree and give a reason. He describes the present situation and ask the students to tell what what has happened previously or what will happen next. Likewise, the students can agree or disagree with the teacher telling why he likes the restaurant. Furthermore, he shows a historical building, tells about its history, tells about the city wanting a parking lot in that location, and then asks the students to argue to save or not save the old building.

Writing Activities

Students can use pictures to develop their writing skills. They can start with identifying the people and objects in a teacher selected picture such as a street scene. Next they can describe the who, what, where, why, and when of a picture. They can take the role of a person or object in the picture and tell what is happening.

In more advanced writing, the students tell a story or narrative about a person or an object in the picture; the teacher may give them one or a series of pictures from Flickr. After their teacher reviews sensory words for descriptive writing, the students do their own search for “school” in Flickrstorm. They select a picture from those shown and write a description of it. The teacher finds a contrast picture such as two animals by using the search term “compare.” Before the language learners do compare and contrast writing, the teacher has them create a graphic organizer to show the differences. Students can see a picture of a cause-and-effect situation like eating food leading to gaining weight and explain the effect in a cause-and-effect type of writing. The learners may see different objects in a teacher selected picture such as red food, classify the food into categories such as dessert, fruit or drinks and then do classification writing.

Flickr provides teachers with a great jumping off point for improving a variety of students' language skills.

Dr. Harry Grover Tuttle focuses on assessing and improving student learning through low- and high-tech tools.

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