Advantages
The visual nature of comic books helps to convey the story, even if students encounter unknown language. When you’re reading a novel in a foreign language, it’s difficult to recover and pick the story up again if you hit a few paragraphs that are incomprehensible to you. But with comic books, the pictures provide enough support that you can still have a rough idea of what is happening in the story even if you are struggling with the language. This makes it easier to jump back into the story again once you’ve gotten through a section with difficult language.
The visual nature of comic books also makes it easier to guess the meaning of unknown vocabulary words. Guessing words from context is often quite difficult for students in normal reading, but in a comic book, the pictures help to convey the meaning of the language
Because of the visual nature of comic books, they are less cognitive work to decipher, and consequently students seem to be able to read them for longer periods of time. A student who can only read a normal book for twenty minutes before getting tired and putting the book down might easily be able to read a comic book for an hour or more.
Comic books allow students to access authentic material. One of the objections that students have towards “graded readers” is that they don’t want to return to an infantilized state when reading in a second language. They often want to continue with the same complexity of materials that they are used to consuming in their L1. (This is why quite often when you bring students to the library, and direct them to the graded reader section, some of them will invariably wander over to the general fiction section and select a book way above their level.) Comic books offer a shortcut to jumping directly into authentic material. They are also a lot more trashy, pulpy and fun than the sanitized and “safe for school” nature of a lot of graded readers.
If you’ve ever been in a bookstore in Vietnam, you can observe that the comic book section is what many teenagers immediately gravitate to. A successful extensive reading program will cater to what the students are already predisposed to read, rather than trying to get them to read something that they are resistant to reading.
A lot of teenagers are interested in the subject material of comic books, and this passion for the subject material often compensates for the difficulty of the language (see Krashen’s Compelling Input Hypothesis)
A big component of building up reading fluency is developing the automatic recognition of words through “massive amounts of repetitive experience” (see Paran, Reading in EFL). However, it is not a requirement that this repetitive experience be built up by reading virtuous high-minded literature. Trashy or pulpy reading materials will build up the automaticity of word recognition just as well as highbrow reading materials. In this case, there’s no reason why students shouldn’t be reading a lot of comic books to practice their reading fluency, especially if that is what they are predisposed to read anyway.
Continuing on from the above point, research in developing L1 literacy in the United States has shown that comic books are a great resource in developing reading skills of native speakers (see here and here and p. 91-110 of this book here).
Disadvantages
Because comic books are authentic material, the quantity of unknown vocabulary is much higher compared to a graded reader.
Comic books are also much more likely to contain irregular spellings, which make it difficult for students to recognize words or use their dictionaries.
Comic books contain a lot of slang words. Older comic books (e.g. Carl Barks) contains a lot of outdated slang. Sometimes comic books will even contain made-up slang. (For example, in one of the Tintin comic books in the library, a student has attempted to write the Vietnamese translation above every word, including Captain Haddock’s curses: “Billions of blue blistering barnacles” For a student like this, who has difficulty not translating every when reading, maybe a graded reader would be more suitable.)
The pictures can be a double-edged sword. They can help students better understand the English words. But they can also cause students to ignore the English words entirely. In my own experience, when I used to read comic books in Japanese, I would sometimes discover that after a few pages of reading, my brain would get tired of trying to decode the Japanese. I would also get impatient with my slow pace of reading and want to flip ahead and look at the next pages to see what would happen in the story. But then, once I had allowed my brain to downshift into this easier mode, it was very hard to get the motivation to upgrade back into the more cognitively demanding mode of careful reading. During extensive reading time in my classroom, I believe I’ve sometimes witnessed my students do the same thing. Some students start out reading the words of the comic book carefully, but then at a certain point, they just start flipping the pages and looking at the pictures. And once they start doing this, they never go back to reading the words carefully, at least not for that particular reading session.
Many of the most popular comic books are a long continuing story that takes place over several volumes. Although this immersive nature of comic book storytelling can be a strength, it can also be a frustration when relying on shared access in a shared library. Library books are occasionally misplaced on the shelves, kept overdue for long periods of time, or sometimes go missing altogether. When the first volume of a long series is unavailable, then this becomes a barrier to reading the remaining volumes of that series.
Suggestions
We suggest that when you are setting up your extensive reading program, you briefly make the students aware of the graphic novels in the library. And if you do a library tour, it may be worth briefly stopping by the graphic novel shelf (located right next to the graded readers in the library) and showing them to students.
Students who are productively engaged with graded readers don’t necessarily need to be encouraged to switch to comic books. But students who are resistant to graded readers might be interested in comic books.
Before taking my class down to the library, I usually briefly try to go over the advantages and disadvantages of comic books, by eliciting if possible.
The student facing information can be kept as simple as possible. For example, the main advantage of comic books is that the pictures help to convey meaning. The main disadvantage is all of the slang.
For example, a sheet like this could do fine:
Talk to your partner. What are the advantages and disadvantages of reading comic books?
Suggested answers
Notes
The terms “comic books” and “graphic novels” are used interchangeably throughout this document
The advantages and disadvantages are a mix of personal anecdotal observations as well as observations from the literature. Since the personal observations are subjective, feel free to take them with a grain of salt, or share your own experiences with reading comic books
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