5 Language and Literacy Skills to Teach with Graphic Novels

Rebekah Carlile

One of my biggest challenges as a speech-language pathologist is finding reading material for my middle and high school students that is challenging, relevant, and accessible. 

Many of my students with language-based learning differences struggle with both reading and reading comprehension. This makes it particularly tough to work on things like ...

main idea, inferencing, summarizing, vocabulary,  & narrative skills.

I’ve used picture books, downloaded articles from ReadWorks , and used SLP created materials like the ones from The Speech Bubble and Speechy  MusingsThese are all solid options, but I wanted something more. And more importantly, my students wanted something more. 

Students, especially those who are 5th grade and up, become increasingly curious about how the work we do together relates to their real life, either academically, socially, or both! I’ve found that it’s harder to track progress and see skills generalize across contexts and subject areas when I’m constantly jumping between topics and text sources. My therapy feels disjointed and not as meaningful. And the kids feel it too.

I’ve tried to use classroom reading assignments to create a sense of relevance and purpose, but they’re often too long, too dense with complex sentence structures, and a slog to get through because of difficult vocabulary. It makes no sense for me to spend an entire session simply getting through the reading material, leaving me barely any time to target the skills that need work!  If I need to target skills like main idea, inferencing, cause-effect, or summarizing – using Edgar Allen Poe’s "The Cask of Amontillado" (just because it was assigned in English class) is NOT going to get us there!

That said, it’s sometimes hard for parents and students to understand the reasons for using a different text to try to build language and reading comprehension skills. It just looks like more work. Why are we adding something else to read, when trying to get through assigned homework is hard enough? 

It's just like anything else...you have to build up to it. No one goes out and runs a marathon before they've run a 5K.    Graphic novels are a fantastic context for focusing on specific language skills because you can take what's hard for your student essentially OUT of the equation.      

Students don’t have to…

Read something they’re not interested in.

Nope, it’s not just about superheroes anymore. Graphic novels come in a wide range of genres, including science, history, biographies, and fiction.

Draw on presumed background knowledge they may not have.

The visual nature of graphic novels help to build meaning in a broader life context and reinforce larger, more abstract ideas.

Get discouraged because it takes so long to read and understand even a couple of pages of text.

There are lots of reasons why reading and reading comprehension may be hard:  fluency, decoding, a weak vocabulary, inability to discern the main idea from the details, difficulty inferencing, weak narrative understanding, etc. Sitting down to read text that’s too hard causes students to skim long passages, rush through to the end, and feel overwhelmed. 

Image

Graphic novels are relevant, accessible, and also challenging.

Graphic novels offer a confidence-building alternative. They’ve made finding reading material, particularly for my students 5th grade and up, more relevant and definitely more accessible. 

But what about appropriately challenging? Aren’t graphic novels too easy? Aren’t they just comic books? Aren’t there fewer words? You may be wondering if any serious language-based learning can actually be done using graphic novels as the context, despite their relevance or accessibility. 

The answer is a resounding YES! Graphic novels (a subset of comics) are becoming widely recognized as sophisticated tools for teaching language and literacy. No longer pushed aside as simplistic texts that are just for entertainment, graphic novels are indeed “real” literature. In fact, many works of literature have now been published in a graphic novel format, including titles like Madeleine L'Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. For my older students who are reading the traditional text in English class, supplementing their understanding using the graphic novel version in therapy has been a gold mine.

Graphic novels combine both visual and verbal information in their storytelling, a particularly important feature for students with language-based learning differences.  In order to fully benefit from the visual component, however, students will need a certain amount of visual literacy. That is, a bit of time should be spent learning how to read a graphic novel so that the panels, gutters, and different kinds of speech bubbles can do their job of adding meaning. (Learn more about how to read a graphic novel in this blog post.)

Armed with a few tips and new vocabulary words, students will quickly use all the visual and text-based information on the pages of a graphic novel to process hard-to-teach concepts like these:

Vocabulary

Teaching students about “shades of meaning” is a well known way to expand vocabulary. Color is a helpful visual for helping students understand that infuriated (dark red) is on the opposite end of the spectrum than miffed (light pink), both synonyms for angry. In graphic novels, color is one way they build understanding of the mood and tone of settings, as well as in character expressions and emotions. (Side note:  I’ve not found the vocabulary words in graphic novels to be lacking in any way. A carefully selected graphic novel will have plenty of challenging vocabulary words!)

Main Idea

In order to teach students to find the main idea, we’d like the text itself to not slow us down. With older students who are not fluent readers, my go-to options have been short films or reading to them to build their listening comprehension. But it’s hard to have a weak reader look back at the text to support their claims. Graphic novels offer a great option for giving older students more practice with this much needed skill. Learning to support their claims using both visual and text-based information enables them to grow their reading comprehension skills in ways they’ve not before been able to. 

Inferencing

When I teach inferencing to my students, it always starts with pictures. We learn to look for clues visually, before ever trying to find clues in text. Graphic novels are a fantastic bridge between the two, especially because students are visually sequencing the story happening over time as they move from panel to panel. You can actually “see” the passage of time, or a flashback. You can ask questions around unseen actions or motivations based on facial expressions. 

Narrative structure

Graphic novels contain the same narrative elements as traditional text: characters, setting, character motivation, character feelings, problem, attempts to solve, climax, and resolution. If you’ve ever used a children’s picture book to teach narrative structure, you can just as easily use a graphic novel for your older students. Bookmark pages that depict a given element, and ask students to use the clues in the illustrations and colors to explain the setting, for example. Point out the thicker lines, intense colors, or a speech bubble with jagged edges that indicate emotional intensity or plot climax.

Summarizing

One of the most common issues I see with my students who struggle to summarize, is that they include too many details. When reading longer nonfiction passages, I teach students to first master paraphrasing each paragraph and making a note of the gist in the margins. Alternately, in a narrative, we might make a bulleted list of every action that happens in a story, and then go back to decide which are main plot points versus details. Graphic novels make it quick and easy to scan the visuals on a page and ask: “Is the information on this page a big idea central to the story, or is it a smaller detail?”

I’ve found graphic novels to be a fantastic resource for teaching higher-level language skills to struggling students. They are often filled with rich, challenging vocabulary, complex storylines, and well-developed characters – all supported by visual elements that support reading comprehension. 

So, don't be afraid to dig into using graphic novels, and let me know how it goes!

Story Stage

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Rebekah Carlile
Speech-Language Pathologist
www.story-stage.com