ABSTRACT
The educational use of visual communication, depends heavily on the assumptions that the skills of ‘reading’ have been acquired elsewhere, or that no skills are necessary at all. The audience/message relation in most forms of educational visual communication is an unanalysed given. Despite the increasing use of a widening variety of forms of visual communication within the education system our knowledge of how students learn from these media is lamentably poor. This chapter is concerned with how we can organise our thinking about the audience/message relation, using pictures, the basis of many uses of visual communication, to exemplify the kinds of issues and problems that can arise. The skills associated with language are systematically extended and developed in our society through the school system’s commitment to mass literacy. This has tended to homogenise its use within any particular language culture, with some standardisation of pronunciation, vocabulary, spelling and grammar.
