Using Webcomics to Improve Reading Skills
www.stickfigurehamlet.com
In addition to helping students understand a type of visual rhetoric in the media, webcomics can promote effective reading skills through the comics’ accessibility and visual components. Cartoons themselves aremotivating tools for students who don’t like to read. In one classroom, students who were interpreting political cartoons did not “link [discussing cartoons] to English” class (Obrist 23). For these students, discussing political cartoons seemed less like schoolwork and more like entertainment, even though the teacher was helping them to improve their reading skills.For students who have difficulty visualizing, comics can help lighten cognitive loads and help students create images in their own minds through the images on the screen, like Stick Figure Hamlet to the left. Moreover, the interactive and dynamic nature of webcomics specifically can ignite and maintain the student’s interest in reading (www.cardet.org). Students are not simply flipping through pages, but rather, they are controlling the flow of the comics through the complex navigation of the internet and hyperlinks.
Improving Questioning Skills
Cartoons also present complex issues in accessible forms like analogy, caricature, and juxtaposition, and these issues and their presentation can help readers develop questioning abilities that improve their critical thinking capacities (Kleeman 9). According to Ciardiello, “question-finding is a literacy skill,” and often students are reiterating “somebody else’s questions” (Ciardiello 238). Instead of teaching students how to be actively engaged in creating their own questions through reading literature, why not teach students first how to find their own questions through webcomics? Each aspect of a webcomic—it’s motivational force, dynamic nature, and topic-choice—can help students create their own questions about their interpretation that can translate into asking questions about literature.
Author: Jennifer Lundstrem
Author: Jennifer Lundstrem
