Abstract:
The system of conventional designations is considered part of the visual semiotics of
the textbook as a whole, performing an important educational function of orienting
students, preparing them to perform educational tasks. The work aims to assess the
compliance of the existing system of navigation signs in the Russian language
textbook with the peculiarities of the visual perception of modern schoolchildren, as
well as to study the creative capabilities of students who create their own symbols that
best meet their ideas. The study included an interpretative experiment and a
generative visual design task with Grade 5 students. During the interpretative
experiment, students analyzed the proposed images of signs: in the first stage, they
interpreted the signs independently, and in the second stage, they selected the most
suitable interpretations from several options. The generative visual design task
required students to create their own signs for the given meanings. The results of the
interpretative experiment showed that some signs1
, such as ‘Writing’ and ‘Working in
pairs/groups’, were correctly understood by most students, whereas signs such as
‘Listening’ and ‘Learning a theory’ proved challenging and resulted in
misinterpretations. At the same time, the generative visual design task revealed that
students faced difficulties in producing new signs for abstract meanings, which
indicates that their visual literacy is still insufficiently developed. The findings of the
study indicate that not all the symbols proposed in textbooks correspond to the visual
thinking and level of visual literacy of schoolchildren. Involving the students
themselves in the creation of navigation signs helps to develop visual literacy as a
component of multimodal literacy of students.
