El uso de la iconografía

El uso de la iconografía surge como estrategia dentro de la

enseñanza del inglés en el gimnasio, ya que por una parte, esta
metodología permite al estudiante enunciar sus sentimientos e
ideas a través de iconos que posteriormente son expresados
de forma oral. Por otro lado, la iconografía respeta las etapas
de desarrollo del estudiante, quien no ha terminado de adquirir
los conocimientos de la lengua materna y debe adquirir la
segunda lengua, en este caso inglés. Por ende, este método
permite que el estudiante desarrolle las estrategias
comunicativas que el departamento de ingles busca que
estudiante cultive en esta etapa.
THE ICONOGRAPHY AS ENGLISH SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
METHOD IN PRESCHOOL AND PRIMARY LEVEL IN GIMNASIO
CAMPESTRE LOS ARRAYANES.

THE TRANSITIONAL STAGE FROM ORALITY TO LITERACY.

Key words: orality, literacy, icon, identity and autonomy.

Abstract.

Introduction

Primary and pre-school students of English class of the Gimnasio Campestre los
Arrayanes, had been developing the ability to communicate their own thoughts and
ideas through pictures. It is easier for them, this way to start up a little dialogue or even
to communicate simple commands, thus overcoming the student´s great difficulty that
arises with the introduction of ESL literacy, reading or writing in English represents a
big complexity, due to the differences between English writing and its phonetics.
Unlike, Spanish writing has a direct relation between phoneme and phonogram,
English writing has relation between phoneme and phonograms are very different and
relay more on historical conventions. Now, the children haven’t finished to learning
mother tongue and they get confused because they are getting into a literacy process
in their mother tongue which enhances the level of difficulty for the children. But for
Gimnasio Campestre Los Arrayanes it is more important to develop communicative
skills at this stage, which is the motive that compelled us to carry out the current
research, aiming to find new ways of introducing writing focusing on oral
communication, respecting the natural language acquisition process of mother
tongue and respecting level of analysis of children. As a result, we obtain the
iconography as a new tool for introducing not only ESL Literacy but also to foster
English oral communication, finding easy and creative forms to improve ESL class
dynamics and learning processes.

Research question

The question that prompted this research project is: How the iconography as second
language acquisition method helps the students to improve their oral production?

This question came up because most of the students who began their second
language acquisition with the iconography, shown a considerable advance in their oral
productions, giving more confidence to their process too.

Context

This research took place at Gimnasio Campestre Los Arrayanes, a private school in La
Calera, Cundinamarca.

Methodology

Teachers at the Gimnasio Campestre los Arrayanes in preschool, primary and high
school have, since the begging of the project, been contributing with new ideas and
theories in order to improve the project of iconography

We basically used for data collection the ethnography method which as Duranti 1999
states “ethnography is the written description of the social organization, social
activities, symbolic material resources and interpretive practices characteristics of a
particular group or people” in that sense; we have collected data during the last 3 years
in which we have been implementing the iconographical method. These data collecting
include field diary of classes, observation and interactional data, includes a collection
and analysis of children’s work and the way the children are able to interpret their work,
based on the most recent second acquisition approaches.

The success of the method and the way it facilitates the ESL acquisition at this oral
stage in the second language acquisition is something we have been measuring
progressively during the last years of implementing it.

Literature review

For the current research we are taking as based the post method, in which, we are not
engaged to a singular methodology but rather we take as many methodologies as we
consider pertinent to our work; methodologies that allow us to start an on going
research aimed to find new methods, ways and techniques that are proper to a
particular group of students or to a particular classroom context or situation. Thinking
about the difficulty that arises due to the difference between graphemes and
morphemes in written and oral English and written and oral Spanish and the relation
between both languages in a second language acquisition process for children at the
Gimnasio Campestre Los Arrayanes , we take iconography as a methodology that lets
teachers to overcame the difficulty of introducing literacy in ESL while at the same time,
fostering orality as primary goal for communication at this oral stage and for any
language acquisition process.

To begin, we take the term icon, since Pierce perspective, in which this one is as any
image that has a direct relation with what it represents whether for resemblance or for
analogy, in this sense as Ong(1996) states in his definition of writing “graph is a
technology that has shaped and fostered the intellectual activity in modern man and it
represents a late development in the history of man”. In the year 3500 BC the
Sumerians in Mesopotamia introduced writing, this is a new technology if we consider
that the history of mankind is about of 50 thousand years

At the very beginning of “writing” before the introduction of graph, the humans used
pictograms to express their thoughts and dreams. We may call those pictograms icons
for their similitude with what they represented. Later in the development of writing we
find in Ong (1996) that “graph in a writing sense is not only a set of images that
represent something but a representation of a set of utterances that someone said or
supposedly said”.

And there is a great variety of writing we find, pictographic (rebus writing)writing kanyy
of mandarin Chinese, the syllabic writing of hiragana, Hebrew writing which doesn’t
have vowels and many alphabets that symbolize sound of the spoken words not things
or ideas. So, in modern alphabets there is a direct relation between graphs and
sounds.

Thus, we take iconography as a methodology in which children can not only write
isolated words or representations or things or concepts but also in a way in which they
can also write utterances, developing and creating their own in which only the group
agree on the meaning of ach single icon this way they can develop orality with out
having to face the differences of alphabetic and phonetic systems wile they are being
introduced literacy in ESL

Also Ong (1996) defines writing as “a coded system through which the writer can
determine the exact words that the reader would generate from the text”

Writing develops gradually from the basic use of resources that help the memory,
starting with the use of pictograms, then the use of ideograms and so on.

Orality and writing suppose two different “psychodynamics” that need to be allowed
for the children to have a proper development. Duranty Alessandro (1999) Page 166.

Findings