BETWEEN WORDS AND DATA: EXPLORING THE COORDINATION OF STUDENTS’ VERBAL AND NUMERICAL LITERACY IN COMPREHENDING INFOGRAPHIC-BASED NEWS TEXTS

Abstract

ABSTRACT

News infographics combine verbal claims, numbers, graphs, icons, and visual hierarchy within a single text, meaning that reading comprehension requires more than sentence decoding. This conceptual development study explores how students coordinate verbal and numerical literacy when interpreting Indonesian-language news texts presented through infographics. A design-oriented synthesis was conducted across five domains: multimodal literacy in Indonesian language learning, infographic reading comprehension, mathematical and numerical literacy, text–graph integration, and critical reasoning. The synthesis generated the Verbal–Numerical Coordination in Infographics (VNC-I) framework, which conceptualizes comprehension as an iterative process of identifying verbal claims, decoding quantities and units, mapping verbal statements onto visual-numerical evidence, testing consistency, and formulating critical interpretations. The framework is operationalized through the READ-DATA cycle: Read the main claim, Examine the visual structure, Attend to numbers and units, Determine verbal–data relationships, Detect consistency, Advance an inference, Test credibility, and Articulate meaning. The article also proposes potential coordination breakdowns, including verbal dominance, percentage–percentage-point confusion, denominator blindness, scale neglect, and overclaiming beyond the data. The framework retains Indonesian language learning as the primary disciplinary domain while positioning mathematics as evidential reasoning embedded in authentic texts. Because the article does not report classroom data, the proposed dimensions require empirical validation through think-aloud protocols, student work, interviews, and task-based assessment in secondary-school Indonesian language classrooms.