Comics in Foreign Language Teaching
_ Today, we
dealt with the appropriate and reasonable integration of comics in foreign
language teaching. Our task was to design our own comic with the help of a web tool
and to create a worksheet (cf. worksheet below).
As regards content, our aim was to create a worksheet dealing with indirect speech. The first task is a creative task since pupils have to fill in the speech bubbles of the comic (cf. Task 1b). Yet, they have to consider that the topic of the children’s conversation is given since the comic is entitled with the word “bullying”. In order to draw the pupils’ attention to this requirement of the task, we included the tasks 1a: ”Have a look at the pictures and the title. What might be the situation of the girl with green hair? What will happen?“ The worksheet can be used in a teaching sequence about violence and problems in school. Hopefully, such a creative task also motivates pupils to practice grammar. The second task deals with indirect speech. From our point of view, it is important to consider the pupils’ real life situation. Therefore, pupils have to put themselves into the position of one of the characters and they have to inform the school’s headmaster about the conflict using indirect speech. As pupils do not merely have to fill in gaps, this task will be appropriate for competence-oriented language teaching and learning. Furthermore, the task is in accordance with the concept of task-based language teaching.
As regards the design and the structure of the worksheet, we aimed at creating a worksheet with a clear structure which is not overloaded with pictures and tasks. For this reason, we decided to use the web tool "MES Comic Stripmaker". With the help of this tool, teachers can design simple and clearly structured comics. Hence, these comics can be used effectively for teaching purposes since unnecessary pictures and excessive illustrations do not distract pupils from their work. Furthermore, dealing with this worksheet pupils already see an example of a comic which can be created with MES Comic Stripmaker. Since the handling of this web tool is self-explanatory and easy, it will be a good idea to give pupils the task to create their own comic, for instance it can be a task for homework. Their comics could be the end of the stories they came up with. Their comics could then be used a second task for practicing indirect speech in the next lesson. For instance, they can work in pairs and can exchange their new comics. After having reported the direct speech given in the speech bubbles, they can do a peer evaluation correcting each other.
As already pointed out, our aim was to create a clearly structured worksheet. For the purpose of transparency, we decided to use a linear structure as the sequence of tasks (Task 1a; Task 1b; Task 2) indicates. Furthermore, we added a header which contains information about the topic and the class. Pupils can add on the right hand side the date. We have not included the date as it is a practice for pupils to write it down in English.
You can download the worksheet:
worksheet_indirect_speech.pdf | |
File Size: | 226 kb |
File Type: |