Are Comics Effective Materials for Teaching Ells? A Literature Review on Graphic Media for L2 Instruction

Abstract

In spite of the arguments teachers, parents, librarians, and critics have raised against students reading comics, research has demonstrated the effective use of comics in the classroom. This paper is a review of the literature that justifies how comics have been used to spark student motivation, heighten vocabulary acquisition, enhance multiple literacies, and improve multimodal skills during the learning process. These multimodal skills are essential for reading comics, since readers are required to make meaning of the visual, audio, and narration features of a comic. Even though the idea of using comics in the general education classroom is becoming more accepted, these discoveries still do not answer a vital question in the field of English Language Learning Pedagogy, which is "Are comics effective materials to use with English Language Learners (ELLs)?" This question helps professionals and researchers further explore the legitimacy of using comics as a tool for teaching and improving language skills. Using James W. Brown's (1977) research as a theoretical foundation, experiences that language learners encounter while reading comics in the target foreign language are clarified. In addition, further language pedagogical practices, based on fieldwork and teaching experience with ELLs in public grade schools and universities in New York City and abroad, are proposed at the conclusion of this literature review. Such proposed practices are instructional practices from the following locations: New York, United States; Tsinghua University in Beijing, China; Chon Buri, Thailand; Traduc Inc. in Santiago, Chile; and Puerto Bolivar, Ecuador.Keywords: ENL, EFL, comics, motivation, vocabulary, multimodal texts STAKING OUT A CONTROVERSY ABOUT CHILDREN READING COMICSDuring fieldwork in a third grade dual English and Spanish language classroom in New York City, several newly arrived and long term English Language Learners (ELLs) were observed. Scrambling through shelves of the school library on a typical Wednesday, the class was searching for books they could read during independent reading time. One ELL had chosen a picture book Knuffle Bunny by Mo Williams, while another ELL selected the graphic novel Bone by Jeff Smith. When the teacher spotted the reading selections by these students, she immediately informed them to find another book: "preferably a chapter book," she added. It seemed as though this teacher did not take the graphic novel genre as appropriate reading material for her students, since comics and graphic novels included more visuals and less text when compared to the Education, Vol. 3, Issue 8, August 2017 http://ijaedu.ocerintjournals.org 299 traditional chapter book. IJAEDU-International E-Journal of Advances inThe idea that comics and graphic novels were not "real" or "preferable" reading materials through the eyes of many teachers is a reoccurring historical argument. Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham was one of the first wellknown and published critics who argued against children reading comic bo...

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