System of Navigation Signs as a Part of Visual Semiotics in School Textbooks

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.