Learning a Thousand Words: EFL learners’ development of vision competencies

Visual literacy (VL), despite its significance, has not received deserved attention in EFL classes in Iran. Addressing this pedagogic and research lacuna, the researchers integrated VL practices into a General English course attended by female university learners, and examined the vision competencies developed by them. The analysis of the data collected through class observation, learner documents, and semi-structured interviews revealed that the learners developed the vision competencies regarding compositional, affective, and critical dimensions of visuals. It is hoped that the findings of this small-scale study encourage language planners, materials developers, and English teachers to pay heightened attention to the visuals’ potential and open more spaces for VL development in their curricula, materials, and language teaching practices.