I'm a big believer that reading comic books is a great way to learn a foreign language. (In my own case, I learned a lot of Japanese by reading manga).
Ever since I started this Story Time project, I had been tempted to bring in some of the old Donald Duck comics. I had been delaying it for a couple years because I thought my students weren't ready, but I finally decided to give it a try.
Many of these old comic books are now available online, so getting access to them is no longer as big a problem as it used to be.
From a list of old Uncle Scrooge comic books, I randomly clicked on this one, and decided to go with it.
It probably wasn't the best choice I could have made. (I somewhat regret just going with the first comic book I clicked on, and not having shopped around more.)
For one thing, the whole plot of this comic revolved around Uncle Scrooge's attempt to recreate The 12 Days of Christmas, and my students in Vietnam weren't even familiar with the song the comic was parodying.
But once I started making materials for this comic, I decided to just finish what I had started and plow ahead.
I solved the problem by pre-teaching The 12 Days of Christmas and playing a youtube animation video of the song before starting this story.
In many ways, this comic was not ideal for ESL students. In addition to all the inside cultural references to The 12 Days of Christmas. the language contains a lot of colloquialisms and slang. (Even worse, because this comic was originally published in 1964, it contains a lot of now outdated colloquialisms and slang).
And I had forgotten just how talky these old comic books were.
Picture books (which I had been using for Story Time up until now) generally just contained a couple lines of text for every illustration. But these comic books were packed full of text boxes and speech bubbles.
When reading this aloud to my class, I felt like I almost exhausted my voice box.
I broke this story up into several parts, and after the 1st part, I felt like the story was completely bombing. I planned on quietly discontinuing this story, and not bringing it up next lesson.
But to my surprise, the students requested to keep going with this story.
Inspite of all the wordiness, they had been intrigued by the cartoons.
That's the great thing about comic books. They pictures do such a great job of carrying the story, that the words don't really matter.
So I decided to keep going.
My general philosophy is that if the students are interested in the story, then that's enough. I don't worry about whether the language is graded perfectly or not.
And I think Krashen would agree with this.
In my original statements and in a more recent paper, I presented evidence for the hypothesis that we need not, and should not, aim at i+1. If we supply a great deal of rich and interesting comprehensible input, i+1 is automatically present. We don't have to "target just the right spot" for optimal acquisition.As for the story: it was pretty good actually.
This is one of Carl Barks's stories. (The story is credited to Walt Disney, as was the custom for all the Disney comics back then. But my Internet research tells me this is one of Carl Barks's).
However, it doesn't have the adventure in exotic lands motif that Carl Barks was famous for. Rather, all the action takes place entirely in Duckburg.
But there's still some genius in the story. The story revolves around one of Donald Duck's schemes that goes wrong, and just keeps getting worse and worse. The story is clever in the way it keeps piling absurdity onto absurdity as Donald Duck keeps getting into more and more trouble.
Materials I used to teach the book in class:
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