John Debes在1970年提出视觉素养这一概念。而近年来，在教学方面对于视觉素养的研究逐渐增加。这些研究多数关于语文、美术、历史及计算机课程等，关于中学英语的教材对于中学生视觉素养培养的研究却很少。

为了适应学生日益增加的培养要求，一批新编版的人教版中学英语教材正在慢慢普及。新教材中的图像资源的设计和图像资源的质量有了很大的不同。

因此，本研究将结合视觉素养和教材中的图像资源，研究新教材中的图像资源对学生的视觉素养影响情况。本研究采用了John Debes（1970）关于视觉素养在教育领域提出的视觉素养是学习者阅读、认知和理解视觉材料的能力的概念。结合了以美国大学研究与图书馆协会提出的视觉素养评价框架，通过调查问卷对学生的视觉素养能力发展水平进行调查。

在分析数据后，本研究发现，被试者的视觉感觉能力处于比较好的水平，视觉认知能力有很大的提升空间，视觉应用能力还需要加强。针对研究结果，本文尝试提出了一些教师如何通过利用教材中的图像资源来提高学生的视觉素养的建议，如通过利用教材的图像资源，带领学生认识图像资源的类型，分析图像的视觉意义等来提高学生的视觉认知能力；通过设计教学任务加强学生的视觉应用能力等。

本研究存在很多不足，如描述性分析缺乏说服力、数据来源过于单一、视觉素养评价框架概念重叠等等。本研究还需要更多的改进和完善。

John Debes proposed the concept of visual literacy in 1970. In recent years, there has been an increase on visual literacy in the field of education. Most of these studies are on art, history and computer courses, but little studies on English textbooks that focus on the development of visual literacy for learners.

Moreover, a new set of English textbooks in the PEP version is slowly becoming available to meet the demands of students’ development. The design and the quality of the image resources in the new textbooks have been significantly different.

Therefore, this thesis combines visual literacy and the image resources in the textbook to study the impact of the image resources in the new textbook on students’ visual literacy. And the study adopts John Debes’ (1970) concept of visual literacy as the learner’s ability to read, recognise and understand visual materials, as proposed in education. In conjunction with the visual literacy assessment framework proposed by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a questionnaire was used to investigate the competency of learners’ visual literacy.

After the data analysis, this study find that the subjects’ visual perceptual competency is at a relatively good level, with great potential to improve in visual cognitive competency and visual application competency still needing to be strengthened. Based on the findings, the thesis proposes some suggestions for teachers to improve students’ visual literacy through the use of textbook, such as leading students to recognize the image resources in the textbook and analyzing the visual meaning of images to improve students’ visual cognitive competency; strengthening students’ visual application competency by designing teaching tasks, etc.

There are many shortcomings in this study, such as the lack of convincing descriptive analysis, too single source of data, overlapping concepts of visual literacy assessment framework, etc. More improvements are needed in this study.