Graphic Novels

For this week's blog post I read the article "Critical Literacies and Graphic Novels for English-Language Learners: Teaching Maus". The article discusses how traditional texts are resources with single modalities while graphic novels are multimodal resources that use striking visuals to accompany text that works to promote readers own knowledge resources. This in turn gives them confidence and helps them grow as students and readers. The visual narrative that accompanies the text in graphic novels can provide clues that shed light on the meaning of an unfamiliar word or grammatical structure. Basically, using a graphic text instead of a prose text to access a topic as heavy as the Holocaust would be more beneficial to second language students due to the inherent scaffolding provided with accompanying visuals that are inserted into the text. While the characters in "Maus" are animals, the author does not hold back from the atrocities that the story centers around. Other important notes that this articles makes is the graphic novel format may appeal to older students as well who are looking for something different from a traditional text and may foster positive student engagement. This is an exciting and oft neglected medium for teaching.

My own personal experience with graphic novels has been extraordinarily limited. I read none in middle or high school and was not at all presented any in the classroom. I think during one choice reading section in 10th grade one of the options I had was a graphic novel, but I chose to read Fahrenheit 451 instead due to my love of dystopian fiction. As an ESL minor, I am definitely on board for including graphic novels in my curriculum as they do an excellent job of providing visuals that benefit the second language learner. I think that it is important for any teacher to represent this medium in their classroom.

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