It’s no secret that a picture is worth a thousand words. An ESL lesson is no exception. Pictures can be an invaluable resource in bridging the gap between a students native language and English. While there are tons of ESL resources with pictures available for teachers to use online, many of them are designed for children. Although this wealth of resources is a big win for K-12 ESL teachers, this can be a bit of a problem for ESL teachers and tutors trying to create materials for adult students.
Teachers with adult students are always encouraged to find material that is appropriate for not only their students level of English but their age as well, and well, sometimes a cartoon doesn’t do the best job in the latter category.
Another thing to consider when using pictures with ESL students is their level of literacy, in their native language as well as in English. When working with low-level literacy students in English, while realia is probably the best thing to use, there are many times where that’s not feasible (I personally do not have the space to lug around a model of everything in the grocery store). Using real photos is the next best thing. They can take the place of doodles, drawings, and cartoons and make an activity come to life. Real photos are also usually more appropriate for adult students, and easier for low literacy students to recognize and connect to the item in real life.
But of course, there is a dilemma. Unless you happen to be a photographer in your spare time, capturing the perfect pictures for you lesson plans, you will probably have to use a photograph taken by someone else.
One of our TEX Training Apprentices, Matthew Johnston weighed in with a great solution:
“If you are looking for pictures to use for your class, it can be easy to get into copyright trouble. To avoid this, I like to use Pixabay and Pexels. These two websites offer CC0 (Creative Commons) pictures that you can use for your ESL classes.”
These websites have tons of stock photos to use in your lessons without getting in trouble for copyright infringement. Crisis averted.
Below is an example of a matching game that Matthew created with images from these websites. What kind of activities could you create? Let us know in the comments! As always, happy teaching.