Verbal text and iconic text. Towards a metacomprehension

Illiteracy is a concrete presence in our society and a real threat for democracy. Educational research is consequently bound to study appropriate means of contrast, in order to allow a deep acquisition of the processes for verbal text decoding. A research project, carried out at Roma Tre University and addressed to first-year university students, considers image reading in a way that is parallel to verbal text reading, with the purpose of building a common metacomprehension framework. A quasi-experimental research was carried out, following the causal-comparative method (pre-test/post-test, experimental and comparison group), in order to verify the hypothesis that the introduction of an image comprehension method improves students' reading ability. The article presents the theoretical background for the experiment, and details instruments and methods used, offering a proposal to envisage a common assessment and teaching framework in understanding texts and images.