Focus: How EFL Brazilian teachers can explore reading strategies in EFL classroom using Comic strips with beginners

Comic Strips: This textual genre has been studied from a larger textual genre, or its hyper genre: Comic Books (or simply named, comics). Therefore, talking about the Comic Strips we also need to refer to Comics. Initially created in the United States, the Comic Strip appeared because of the lack of space in the newspapers for the publication of the pastimes. Being of a multimodal nature (as it contains oral and written textual aspects in it) and it is short and presented in a sequenced way, this genre fell in the taste of newspaper readers. Also, they have another very peculiar feature that attracts their readers: humor in the stories (Barbosa, 2014, Vergueiro; Ramos, 2015).

The comic strips contain informal language, short dialogues and iconic - verbal resources (colors, balloons, onomatopoeias, visual metaphors) allowing readers to understand more clearly what they read. Besides this conversational characteristics in its textual structure, comic strips present features of reality in a humor way, as Vergueiro and Ramos (2015) point out. As Vergueiro and Ramos (2011) defines, "are graphic visual devices that convey and discuss aspects of social reality, presenting it in a critical and humorous way" (p.11) ( my translation). Furthermore, the Comic strips explore the multidiversity aspect of Multimodality theory in its thematic content since it presents reality issues in its stories. Themes such as ecology, recycling, planet Earth protection are commonly covered in comic strips or from Monica's Gang Comics, for example (Vargas; Magalhães, 2011).

Classroom Application: Comic strips in EFL reading classes has been increasingly found in textbooks as well as been explored by teachers that the ENEM (National High School Examination) in Brazil (Barbosa, 2014, Vergueiro, 2014) also uses them in the written tests to explore multimodal resources as a reading strategy.

According to Vergueiro et. al, the comic strips "(...) present themselves as a sequence of pictures that bring a message to the reader, usually a narrative, whether fictional or real" (2014, p. 32, my translation). In other words, a sequential reading is required, from frame to frame, considering all multimodal resources involved in the frames (colors, characters’ body language, onomatopoeias, facial expressions, etc.) to support reading comprehension. This multimodal reading, or in the words of Kress (1998), visual structures (images) perform meanings just as the reading of linguistic structures do in written texts.

Used as a pedagogical resource, the comic strips pictures can be used in a variety of ways in EFL reading classes, contributing towards the development of learners’ reading strategies. The pedagogy can, thus, be divided into three parts. In the pre-reading section, teachers can explore the images as a way to call students’ attention to the situation in which the story occurs, i.e. the setting. At this point, teachers can turn to the characters’ actions - what they are doing, how they interact to themselves in the whole story and in which ways their performances contribute to the overall meaning of the story. In the comic strips, each sequence shows a specific meaning that moves forward to the following sequence to form a story global meaning.

In what follows, I show how the pre-reading (experiential knowledge process), reading (conceptual and analyzing knowledge processes) and post-reading (applying knowledge process) stages can be explored in an EFL classroom environment with beginners:

Monica's Gang Image 1

Monica's Gang Image 2

Monica's Gang Image 3

Monica's Gang Image 4

Available in#: http://17minutosdeingles.blogspot.com/2012/10/normal-0-21-false-false-false-pt-br-x.html

In this comic strip, Smudge is catching Jimmy Fiver’s attention running toward him. Such physical action – ‘running toward him’ - is also linked to Smudge's facial expression which suggests that he (Jimmy Five) should not open the door, expressed by his speech - ‘No Jimmy Five! No!’ - In this first sequence, both Jimmy Five and Smudge’s facials expression – of surprise - might indicate that the subject brought by Smudge is not one of the best; there is something strange that may (or may not) happen if Jimmy Five opens that door.

Still in this same sequence, we can unite the image, in this case, the Smudge and Jimmy Five’s facials expression, to the two characters’ speeches. As a typical multimodal genre, the oral text might contradict or complement information to the visual text giving greater visibility to the overall construction of the narrative sequence (Barbosa, 2014; Vergueiro et. al, 2014;Vergueiro; Ramos, 2015). In this process of understanding what is happening in the strips above, it depends on the reader’s background and linguistic types of knowledge to interpret these two information semioses - the visual and written one;

An alternative to another reading activity, oral skills can also be explored with oral readings. Considering that the lines in the comic strips are typical examples of informal oral texts, i.e. children's everyday speech, we can use them to explore the use of slangs^[1] and / or other typical speech expressions in detriment of formal written language. Also in this aspect in working with the ability of speech, we can explore the characteristics of the characters’ speeches together with the grammatical structures used by them. Short phrases, imperative verbs, phrasal verbs such as the one found in the strips above - No, what? Just open this door and go in - can be taught so that learners can create their own stories as homework, for example.

Another way to work with comic strips in the classroom, especially with children, involves writing with drawings. At this moment, we are working with the post-reading phase, where we, teachers, evaluate what the students learned in reading the strips beforehand. Asking students to draw based on what they understood or drawing a story can be an innovative and creative alternative to write other stories from what they have previously read. This conception of working with EFL reading can lead readers to re-create other stories, making them aware that every story has a connection to other stories.

Just below we can see a Youtube video of Monica’s Gang, another teaching alternative to explore the listening and reading skills with the subtitles (when needed).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0lIZTw4qY0&t=106s

REFERENCES

Ramos, P.; Vergueiro. Quadrinhos na educação: da rejeição à prática. 1. Ed., 2ª reimpressão, São Paulo: Contexto, 2015.

Vergueiro, W.; Rama, A.; Vilela, T.; Ramos, P.; Barbosa, A. Como usar as histórias em quadrinhos na sala de aula. 4. ed. , 2. reimpressão, São Paulo: Contexto, 2014.