Infographics for Teaching Reading and Writing in Higher Education

Abstract

Upon entering university, students must acquire a range of knowledge that will enable them to cope with their first academic activities successfully. However, this knowledge requires the development of a skill set that enables them to work with specialized texts. Particularly in those careers where the learning of Linguistics is relevant,novice students must become aware that language is a subject of study. Therefore, they need, on the one hand, to learn and understand its conceptualizations and technical explanations. On the other hand, they also have to employ language to communicate the specific knowledge that pertains to the subject, while adhering to the requirements of academic genres. In this context, reading and writing often become obstacles as students are not familiar with academic discourse. In this article, we propose a work plan to be implemented in a first-year class, using infographics to scaffold students' work in their reading and writing processes. Specifically, our focus will be on the task of reading and searching for information to subsequently create a text in infographic format. To accomplish this, as a theoretical framework, we will draw upon the genre-based pedagogy and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday 2003; Martin and Rose 2018), as well as Moyano's proposals (2013, 2017). This approach is necessary as the teaching of reading and writing requires didactic proposals that, based on evidence, enable students to improve their performance, while also providing clear and precise steps that consolidate their learning before advancing towards new challenges.