The universal language of pictures: A critical tool for advancing student writing

Pictures offer a universal language for thinking and recording ideas. Creating pictures before writing can provide an engaging and effective alternative pathway into literacy learning for English learners and others who struggle with writing. As educators face the many challenges of trying to meet the diverse needs of students in their multilingual classrooms, treating pictures and words as parallel, complementary, and equal languages for learning can serve to strengthen students’ literacy engagement, deepen their thinking, and support language acquisition, thus providing a critical bridge into written language. As second‐language experts call for allowing translanguaging—the natural movement between and among languages—and the creation of dual language and multilanguage texts, this article explores why moving to a multimodal, pictures‐first approach to teaching writing offers English learners and their teachers an additional layer of scaffolding to support the acquisition of essential literacy skills.