In the age of the media, children face reading literacy and visual literacy challenges atpre-school and primary school age and the development of broad literacy skills, whichgo far beyond a purely text-based approach (e.g. critical and competent use of visualmaterial, coding and decoding of pictures) would therefore appear necessary. However,school education has traditionally focussed primarily on the acquisition of writtenlanguage.In light of this observation, the project starts by researching the visual preferences ofpre-school and young children and then designing teaching/learning arrangements. Thisideal type of learning arrangement should encourage the transfer of elementary visualskills, evoke interest in visual forms of expression, promote individual articulacy andhelp to advance verbal and non-verbal linguistic skills in the form of best-practiceexamples. It is expected to promote sustainable literacy skills which allow successfuluse of verbal and visual forms of expression. This allows the disadvantages anddrawbacks thematised in international investigations (e.g. PISA) to be processed.Including (visual) literacy is particularly valuable in language learning programmes forchildren from an immigration background.Elementary and primary school teachers are given the necessary professional skills andtrained in visual skills and level-of-learning diagnosis in training sequences and furthertraining modules.The international comparison in the project gives an insight into cultural differences andvisual communication. The reference to three different scripts (Latin, Cyrillic and Greekalphabets) makes this a particularly exciting project.The results of the project will be published for practising teachers, supplemented bypublications for children. Articles intended for specialists and teacher trainers will alsobe published.