![]() One teacher in Australia told me, for instance, that she created storyboards with comic characters to help her students better understand Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. ![]() Some teachers use the strips as storyboards to help students understand books that they are reading in class. Some educational therapists also use computer-generated comic strips with deaf and autistic people and trauma victims to help them understand concepts and communicate. Some teachers have told me that when their students are working in the computer lab and creating their comic stories, they can barely hear a sound, so involved are the students in the writing and composing process. Other times, the use of a computer to generate a comic strip provides students with a very focused and gratifying personal experience as they manipulate characters and conceive of words that they will key into the computerized comic.Ī student thus enters her own world, the world of her imagination. Often the process of creating a comic strip involves collaboration among students, which is important not only in the classroom but also in the workplace. As they learn to negotiate a comics generator web site and move characters and thought balloons around, they are also improving their computer skills. With computer literacy so emphasized today in ESOL and literacy programs, the very act of encouraging a student to create a simple comic strip online also provides a way for students to become more comfortable using computers. Or, a student who has been experiencing stomach pains and has scheduled an appointment with a doctor can practice the medical words he will need to express what is hurting him. Similarly, a parent who expects to meet her daughter's teacher at open school night can create a comic strip in which she practices the academic vocabulary that she will use that evening. In the thought and speech balloons, the student can practice interviewing techniques and engage in make-believe conversations that cover the ground one can expect in the interviewing process. A student, for example, who might be looking for a job and wants practice interviewing, could set up a story in which one of the characters stands as a surrogate for him and the other represents the potential employer. The characters become surrogates for the students. For example, place an angry looking character into the same panel with a surprised one, and there is an immediate graphical tension set up that the writer will want to exploit and resolve through words. Whether you use characters from a web site or cut them out from a newspaper, you want to use characters with a wide variety of emotions and looks. Oftentimes, before I ever created an electronic comic strip generator, I would take colorful paper comics from the newspaper, white out the words in the balloons, photocopy these wordless strips, and ask students to fill in the balloons with their own words. And, anyone who sees a blank talk or thought balloon floating over the head of a character wants to fill it in immediately doing so is the beginning step to tell a story. Only few words are required for the characters to go about their lives and reveal their stories. And readers with limited reading skills are not as overwhelmed in dealing with the size of a comic strip as they can be with a book of many pages.Ĭomic strips also don't require long sentences or paragraphs to tell a good story. Each strip's three or four panels provide a finite, accessible world in which funny or compelling characters live and go about their lives. Telling stories by building comic strips is a way to strengthen struggling students' emerging English-language skills and make the difficult job of language learning a much more enjoyable experience.Ĭomic strips are a perfect vehicle for learning a language. There they can select among the many characters offered and fill in their talk and thought balloons. My experience with comic strips as a child inspired me many years later, as a teacher of adult classes in English for speakers of other languages, and literacy programs, to use them with students as a resource to help them write, read, and tell stories in English.Ībout year ago I launched a free web site called Make Beliefs Comix to enable teachers, trainers and students to create their own comic strips online. And in no time, I was reading and creating my own comics. I was challenged to decipher the white balloons coming from the characters' mouths or above their heads. As a kid, I began learning how to read while looking at the beautifully drawn cartoon characters in the Sunday funny pages.
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