Proximal Positioning in Students’ Graph Commentaries

Abstract

Visual data pervade disciplines and genres. Graphs, diagrams and tables illustrate and complement verbal contents in textbooks, exams, research articles or class notes across the academic field and may even stand as independent texts, especially in the hard sciences. Despite this ubiquity, however, the receptive and productive abilities they involve are acquired disjointedly and intuitively. We learn how to decode graphics during the early high school years (Myers, 2003), along with the language of the specific subjects and texts in which they are embedded, but normally do not verbalize them until later at university, if not once in the professional arena. This is the plight of many Spanish graduates. Technology people, in particular engineers, do not need to interpret visuals unless they interact with other communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) for whom the graphic information presented is abstruse or alien to their shared repertoires.