ARE COMICS EFFECTIVE MATERIALS FOR TEACHING ELLS? A LITERATURE REVIEW ON GRAPHIC MEDIA FOR L2 INSTRUCTION

Erika Edith Clark
Teachers College, Columbia University, The United States, eec2147@tc.columbia.edu

Abstract
In spite of the arguments teachers, parents, librarians, and critics have risen against students reading comics, past, recent, and developing research have presented 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 slowly improving, 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 consequent of instruction and curriculum taught in schools in 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