If I had a superpower, it would be this: I'd love to be able to hold out my hand and just project at will, in the air, images or videos of whatever I happen to be seeing in my mind's eye at the time.
One of the most difficult things to train our students to do is visualize the things they are reading and hearing. Orhan Pamuk talks about what happens in the brains of readers. He mentions that we transform words (hearing, telling and reading) into images in our minds and visualize what happens in the story, because it helps us to seek out meaning. He suggests that we create a third dimension of reality. Our own reality is the first dimension, the concept of the story is the second, and the third is the reality that exists within the story, and our involvement in it. Keith Oatley of the University of Toronto says that evidence suggests that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, and that the brain doesn't make much a distinction between reading or hearing about an experience and actually experiencing it. This is sometimes an issue in foreign language teaching, because while children are acquiring a new language, they also have to be retaught to listen and read. This is something that happens almost unconciously in many fluent speakers (although by no means in all of them), and now students are having to reacquire that. So how do we encourage it? Well, there are a lot of methods.
One of them is asking students to visualize, actively, particular scenes in stories or texts, and to ask them to describe specifically, in detail, what they see.
Acting is another one - it puts the students in the position of actually watching the action. Readers' Theater can be a hugely powerful tool in that regard, if it's done well. Costumes are of enormous help. Today in class, for example, my uppers were acting out a scene from a play, and so we dressed each of the students up like the characters we were playing, used our rewind-and-correct feature, and we adjusted movements, tone of voice and staging until we'd gotten through the scene, and it made it much more intelligible. My lowers are reading about Pompeii, so we turned out the lights, hauled out the props, and visualized the forum. We turned tables upside down for ruins, and we imagined smoke and fire everywhere, and then we went through the physical motions of the story.
The last of the immediate answers is drawing, and this is also a very powerful thing to do. The three stories that my IIs are reading about Pompeii right now are very complicated, with a lot of scenes, motion and motivation. We have illustrated every scene, every step of the way, as we read. Then today, we retold the entire story based on an illustration that I had done. One of the most instructive comments I received was that the students wished we had drawn it WHILE we were talking rather than using a pre-drawn picture, and so I hired an artist. The job of the artist (who draws MUCH better than I do) will be to stand at the board with an army of markers and draw every story we tell. This frees us up to add whatever details we want, so I don't have pre-prepare slides (i.e. they can have a visual, but I don't have to pre-plan everything), and it means I can wander around the room as well. Sometimes, this is doable with smaller boards and a document camera, particularly in less complex stories (and I have an artist whose job that is, as well - to sit with the doc cam and lots of markers and white boards and illustrate everything. I'm particularly blessed in that my doc cam takes pictures, so I can save the pictures they draw for later), but today I wanted the whole thing drawn across the board in one large picture. Tomorrow, groups will be creating a large mural of the whole text, adding lines from the story where necessary. Then, I will show them a film that one group made of the story. Then, and only then, will I ask them to write about it - when I am 100 percent sure they can visualize everything.
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