The first guest post on my site
By Natalie Hunter
Many people have seen the caption contest in the back of the New Yorker, which presents a single frame of a comic and invites readers to put some words in the mouth of a character in that comic. Expanding this exercise beyond a single frame can make for very good English practice though. Although many people think of comics as puerile, they have become increasingly artistic and well written over the years. People like Scott McCloud and organizations like the National Association of Comic Art Educators (NACAE) are doing amazing work at teaching people how to tell stories using this visual art. Students can go to an online school to study comics, and thanks to the Internet more people can publish comics than ever before. The great thing about this is is that there is a huge resource of comics out there to rewrite in a classroom setting.
Rewritten comics are useful for teaching English because they give a framework for dialogue, but one that is quite malleable. A single comic may yield drastically different stories, even among students with the same level of English. Plus, students will enjoy reading the comics of other students, which can be much more productive than just listening to another student recite a dialogue from memory.
The first thing to do is read a lot of webcomics and make sure that they will fit your purpose. Kate Beaton is a great example of what to look for in a comic: the stories are self contained, the characters are expressive, and perhaps most importantly she is completely fine with having classes rewrite her comics. It is unlikely that you will run into copyright issues as you won’t be publishing your students’ comics for money, and many webcomic artists are very open about copyright issues, but if you think there will be a problem with the artist you should contact them yourself. On the other hand, comics that are mainly just talking faces, have no discernible action, are part of a continued storyline, or are just stick figures may be much harder for students to write a dialogue for. The best way to test the usability of a comic is to write a story for it yourself. If you can make something up that is different from the original but still makes sense given the actions of the characters, then you’ve got a winner.
Once you’ve got your comic, use a photo editing program to remove the text, or print it out and white out the dialogue before you make copies. If your students are just beginning to use English, it may be easiest to take out the words from the dialogue that they have learned and let them fill it in. Once they’ve learned sentence structure and grammar though, feel free to erase all the dialogue and let them go at it. The more panels a comic has, the more difficult it is to keep up a cohesive narrative, so keep this in mind when you are choosing a comic for a class. Use comics that have particular actions to complement specific lessons, like one with people at a bar for a lesson on introducing yourself, or another one that shows people voting to enforce the vocabulary of elections. It is also important to allow the students to critique one another’s comics in order to promote proper grammar, narrative structures, and spelling.
Comics combine visual creativity with narrative practice in English, and the creation of one can be a fun and rewarding task. Rewriting comics is a medium students of all abilities and ages find easy to engage with, perhaps even more so than normal worksheets. It’s a perfect activity to restore flagging attention in a classroom. And, once your students have gotten used to writing comic narrative, or if you want to shake things up a little, there are also several resources available online for creating brand-new comic or animated narratives. Pixton is one of my favourites for comic creation, and I have heard good things about Make Beliefs Comix- both of these support multiple language entry, so they’re useful for teaching other languages or practicing translation as well. One of the coolest programs though for creating narratives is probably GoAnimate, which allows you to create animated movies with recorded voices, which can be a lot less stressful a project for language practice than standing in front of a class and reciting sentences from memory. Have fun!
About the writer
Natalie Hunter grew up wanting to be a teacher, and is addicted to learning and research. As a result she is grateful for the invention of the internet because it allows her to spend some time outside, rather than just poring through books in a library. She is fascinated by the different methodologies for education at large today, and particularly by the advent of online education. She also loves to travel and learn via interaction with other people and cultures.
