Comics and Graphic Novels

We live in a globalized world that constantly develops. Literacy is no longer just about the fact that we are able to read or write, it is so much more. The National Curriculum of England says that children should be able to ‘read books that are structured in different ways and read for a range of purposes, and identify how language, structure and presentation contribute to meaning’ (Department for education, 2013:43-44). Comic books and graphic novels can be a good source when it comes to learning these elements, since they both are structured in a different way, than a “normal” novel. Before being able to understand a comic book or graphic novel, it is important to be able to identify the written words, the structure, the pictures etc. This allows children to link narrative with visuals, and it is also a good source when it comes to promoting thinking skills and develops wider metacognitive abilities.
Research support the fact that images connect better to long-term memory than text alone, so by combining image and text the children will be able to learn more by visualizing new information (Kouyoumdjian, 2012).
The use of comic books and graphic novels in the classroom is actually a way to contribute and offer new opportunities for learning.
One thing that can be a bit problematic is that a lot of comic books and graphic novels are aimed at teenagers and adults, so it can be difficult to locate suitable literature to use with primary school children (Stafford, 2011). It can take a lot of time and preparation to find the appropriate material, but it is definitely worth it.

A good thing to include and do in the classroom is to make the children create their own comic books online. This could also help them to improve their multimodal literacy skills, it helps them not only just to visualize and combine images and text, it also gives them a way to see how they can structure and understand the meaning of it. But before they get to this stage, it is important that they are familiar with the design programme, so they know what to do. It can be a bit frustration if the programme/app is hard for them to figure out.

Another outcome of this is that they get to think about the importance of the spoken language/dialogue, and how people communicate with each other. When they read novels, it is mostly the written dialogue that are the most important thing, not said that the spoken language do not appear in novels, but that it is in comic books and graphic novels the spoken language/dialogue have more influence, since a comic is build up around speak bubbles. It gets them to visualize and think about the importance of the interaction between people and characters.

The comic my group and I made: