Understanding “Green Germany” through Images and Film: A Critical Literacy Approach

Abstract

Abstract This article reports on the ways of incorporating paintings, posters, and film into an advanced German content‐ and language‐integrated course calledGreen Germany. It demonstrates how these visual media can be employed for enriching the exploration of various aspects of the course's environmental themes. In line with the research on the development of visual literacies (Cope & Kalantzis, ; Unsworth, ), the approach helps equip German learners with the tools to analyze the socially and culturally constructed nature of, in this instance, German public discourse on the environment, and thus develop their critical literacy abilities. In particular, it is demonstrated how leading learners towards interpretation of the visual media within a genre‐based and systemic‐functional framework (Halliday, ; Kress and van Leeuwen, ; Martin, , ) facilitates critical distance from the solely referential information in these examples of public discourse. The article concludes with a brief examination of an analysis by one of the class participants, showing how she applies the proposed critical literacy tools.

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