Center for Advancement of Art-Based Literacy Pictures offer a universal language for thinking and recording ideas. Creating pictures before writing can provide an engaging and effective alternative pathway into literacy learning for English learners and others who struggle with writing. As educators face the many challenges of trying to meet the diverse needs of students in their multilingual classrooms, treating pictures and words as parallel, complementary, and equal languages for learning can serve to strengthen students’ literacy engagement, deepen their thinking, and support language acquisition, thus providing a critical bridge into written language. As second‐language experts call for allowing translanguaging—the natural movement between and among languages—and the creation of dual language and multilanguage texts, this article explores why moving to a multimodal, pictures-first approach to teaching writing offers English learners and their teachers an additional layer of scaffolding to support the acquisition of essential literacy skills.

中文翻译：

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图片的通用语言：促进学生写作的重要工具

艺术素养图片促进中心为思考和记录想法提供了一种通用语言。在写作之前创建图片可以为英语学习者和其他写作困难的人提供一种引人入胜且有效的识字学习替代途径。由于教育工作者面临着在多语言课堂中试图满足学生多样化需求的诸多挑战，因此将图片和单词视为平行、互补和平等的学习语言可以帮助加强学生的识字参与度，深化他们的思维，并支持语言习得，从而为进入书面语言提供了重要的桥梁。由于第二语言专家呼吁允许跨语言——语言之间的自然移动——以及双语和多语言文本的创建，