As a part of Zayed University's research cluster "Languaging and higher education in bilingual contexts," Dr. Effrosyni Georgiadou and I are working on developing a textbook for students who learn writing for the media in English as their second language. This textbook is meant to teach ESL writers how to write for news audiences. At the same time, the textbook addresses the most common English grammar errors we see in students' work here in the UAE. Pictures are our main tool for helping ESL writers in mastering their trade.

Mastering journalistic and public relations writing is hard enough even for native speakers because it differs from how we tell stories to our friends. Remember how we tend to start from the beginning of the event and conclude with how it ended? However, when we tell stories to the audience in a newspaper, we start with either the most important and recent outcome or with an attention-grabbing opening. In addition, in journalistic writing we pay more attention to punctuation, and our writing must conform to the rules of Associated Press Style. Simply put, this style, developed by one of the most influential news agencies, tells us which rule to adhere to in cases when several options are possible.

Writing for the media in English is even harder for students whose native language is not English. The task of teaching undergraduate ESL writers presents a challenge for the teacher, too. Even more so when English is the only language shared by the teacher and her students.

We are basing our textbook on the view of Salomon (1994) who argued that information is communicated through two major symbol systems: words and pictures. Salomon wrote that words need special training to be decoded while pictures need to be recognized to be understood.

I researched the effects of symbol systems on learning for my dissertation in which I explored if moving pictures (television news) help immigrants in the U.S. learn from American news compared to news in written words (newspaper news) and news in spoken words (radio news). In my online experiment, immigrants who were exposed to television news did indeed recognize more correct answers about the news stories than did immigrants exposed to newspaper and radio news.

While ESL teachers use pictures in their instruction all the time, textbooks on journalistic writing may include some pictures for illustrative purposes but those photos are not used as a basis for students' learning - words are. In our textbook, we apply the approach well-known to teachers of foreign languages to teaching ESL media writers.

We do so with a twist. Actually, with two twists.

First, in an unusual move for a textbook on media writing, we start out our textbook with writing photo captions, the text that every photo in a newspaper, magazine or on a website must have to explain what exactly is happening in the picture. In most of the textbooks, photo journalism as a topic appears closer to the end of the book. We start with photos to build on the experience of language teachers who get their students talking by describing what's in the picture. We posit that describing what's in the picture will immerse our ESL writers into writing news stories and will give them a chance to review the grammar rules with which our Arabic-speaking students tend to struggle and learn the rules of Associated Press Style about addressing people, places and time.

Second, we will use pictures to illustrate news stories used as examples in our textbook. Some of these illustrations will be photos, some will be drawn based on a photograph, and some will be drawn to map a chronology of the event onto a story structure used in journalistic and PR writing.

To track the effectiveness of our approach, we will quantitatively analyze errors in students' writing in three semesters: (1) a semester that used a traditional structure of the content, (2) a semester when students were introduced to writing photo captions, and (3) a semester when students were given drafts of our textbook as readings.