چکیده:
Abstract The changing culture toward multimodality enforces acquiring visual literacy in every aspect of today’s modern life. One of the fields intermingled with using various modes in different variations is language teaching and learning, especially for and by young learners. Young language learners’ (5-12 years old) lack of world experience forces them to make the most use of non-verbal modes of communication to receive and send the intended message, enhanced in foreign language learning environment. As a result, the language teacher him/herself will be supposed to be armed with visual literacy of this new language and to have the ability to successfully transmit this knowledge to the students. The present study aims to investigate whether the three focused factors in educational semiotics; namely, Process of abduction, Principle of kinesics, and Proxemics- proposed by Sert (2006) exist in the curriculum of Iranian pre-service language teachers in one of the educational districts in Isfahan. By distributing two questionnaires among TTC course instructors and pre-service teachers, and obtaining the percentage of the analyzed data, the findings showed that the number of institutes which focus on the matter are rare. Also, it was revealed that the pre-service teachers, majoring in English Language, performed better in terms of realizing the meaning of body language units and comparing and contrasting them (principle of abduction). The results will be useful for future teachers and their educational curriculum in favor of enhancing the fifth language skill, foreign language visual literacy.
خلاصه ماشینی:
The present study aims to investigate whether the three focused factors in educational semiotics; namely, Process of abduction, Principle of kinesics, and Proxemics- proposed by Sert (2006) exist in the curriculum of Iranian pre-service language teachers in one of the educational districts in Isfahan.
As the child’s need to communicate non-verbally is enhanced in a foreign language learning atmosphere in which the weakness of communicational power as well as cultural strangeness enhance, teacher’s familiarity with and making use of different types of signs- namely, index, symbol, and especially icon- will result in a better teaching/learning outputs.
Consequently- according to the rarity of the number of the studies done in favor of the kinesics and proxemics in kid’s foreign language learning, and its importance from cultural point of view- this research is set out to investigate whether three focused factors in educational semiotics (ES)- namely, Process of abduction, Principle of kinesics, and Proxemics- proposed by Sert (2006) exists in the curriculum of Iranian pre-service language teachers in one of the educational districts in Isfahan.
In the second phase, the second questionnaire handed out to the pre-service teachers in the rest of the institutes, showed that the participants who had a degree in language studies had a more thorough knowledge of the meaning of body language units, and were more competent in the process of abduction.
Although there are some differences between the meanings of the units of body language in Persian and English cultures, I do not teach them for pre-service teachers.
I teach body language units for pre-service teachers and I contrast and compare their differences and similarities in Persian and English cultures.