Teacher Discussion Forums

Hi, everyone. I am going to have an English class on comic strips. Do you have any lesson plans on this topic?
My students are learning English as a foreign language at intermediate level. Most of them are interested in comic strips, but they have difficulty in expressing it in English. What can I do to help them?

This is a very motivating topic. Do you have time to ask them to bring in comics? Put them in small groups with the comic strips that have their words blanked out and let them fill in the vocabuarly. Individually they may not have the words but usually they are able to come up with something as a group. They can make their own comics as well, first telling the story and then making the pictures to go along with them. There are comics on the Internet to copy. Do they know the history of major comic figures? Even Donald Duck has a huge family tree that is great for teaching family relationships.

Hi raelyn and Sally! The sort of activities that I was thinking of concerning comic strips were similar to Sally's...so now, I'd rather talk about "film frames" (similar to storyboards, which are in turn kind of related to comic strips).

You might like to play "my" Guess the movie game (on the "Activities and Games" thread) before doing the following: ask the students to draw several "frames"/stills that will help to relay the key moments/points of a movie plot. The artistic level does not need to be high, nor the pictures large.

To give the students some idea of what you're asking them to do, you could supply them with a few filmstrips of frames that you've drawn beforehand. I myself have made a sheet with five little 1" square frames with "film strip" surrounds, and inside each frame I've drawn key moments from e.g. Titanic (1-Boy meeting girl on ship; 2-Boy and girl standing on bow of ship, "flying"; 3-Ship hitting iceberg; 4-Jack dead in water, Rose looking aghast; 5- Rose as old lady crying and throwing necklace into sea).

Put the students into pairs and hand them a blank sheet of this "film stock" with blank frames, and ask them to choose a movie and draw the story in pictures; they should keep their work a secret from other pairs.

When everyone has finished (after, say, 10 minutes), get pairs to exchange sheets and see if they can guess which movie is being portrayed.

Students can then try to come up with some English for each picture (Simple Present) before giving the sheet back to the original artists for "marking".

The original artists could make the text into a gap-fill exercise for the rest of the class by deleting keywords (you could also supply a gap-fill text along with your example filmstrip at the beginning of the class - I did with my "Titanic" filmstrip: He's Jack, an [artist], and he meets this girl, Rose, and they [fall in love]...). The students creating the gaps could supply small written translation "prompts/equivalents" (in the L1) if they reckon that their classmates might be confused about what kind of item is required in the gap (if you've ever tried to complete a cloze test yourself, you'll know how difficult it can sometimes be to predict anything even remotely resembling the required item!).

Yeah, good ideas from fluffyhamster,

i did this lesson by searching on the internet for a few comics (i found loads of free ones to copy.), print them out, then just erase off all of the words with tip-ex, and photocopying, so the students can pick which one they like.

Another idea is to draw the initial picture of a cartoon on the board at the top left, and elicit words from the students of a quick dialogue, then allow each student to follow on from this, with another box, picture and dialogue, so that each student gets a chance to shape this comic strip. Though you need well behaved students to do this really well.

And writing a dialog does not have to be advanced English, many words in a comic are simple or even sounds like, arghhhh, boooom etc...

The only thing with filling in actual comic strip speech bubbles (with direct speech) is that the students can often end up writing what is ultimately a load of nonsense - certainly not stuff that would make much sense to anyone, if it was ever even appropriate to say to anyone in general. I think it would be better to work on language with a clear, useful and common function (e.g. use of simple present for relating movie plots - which is clearly what a "filmstrip" of frames/stills, with accompanying example gap-fill exercise, is meant to elicit), rather than depend on just comic strip pictures to make the "point" (potential language point) of the "activity" (filling in speech bubbles with...?) "clear".

If original comic-strips are used, perhaps students should be trying to roughly guess what was originally said (but as anyone who's tried close gap-fill exercises will tell you, this can sometimes be extremely hard to do...which is why students can often write a lot of nonsense, even given the "context" of the sequential pictures. It's probably better, as I've said, to get them relaying "known" things - that everyone i.e. at least the student(s) and teacher - can "agree" upon, than to try to guess what the hell the student was thinking when they have character B say *#$%&. Student-scripted skits can also be hell to assess when there haven't been enough storyline ideas and guidance supplied beforehand).

Hmm that's an idea - write a comic strip or storyboard from a script or short story (like it's being made into a movie), and base the dialogue on what's in or implied by the story or script (some but not all of it); or adapt a story into a screenplay then into a comic strip. All of these stages would provide some guidance on what the direct speech would (could, "should") consist of.

You can carry this project further and make the movie. In Greenland we brainstormed old myths and folktales in Greenlandic and the students chose 4 or 5. They then told me briefly the plot in English and we outline this on the board together. They copied this down and then formed groups to make one of the movies. They used the digital camera to take still shots to make a storyboard. This gave them the idea of where they would like to take the movie and what props they would need. Then they borrowed the video camera and made the movie. Lots of glitches along the way but a good chance for them to try and work out the difficulties with me in English and really the first time these small groups had ever worked together. We then showed the movies to the whole class and they critiqued them and fixed them and then we showed them to whole school, parents, etc. They were very proud of their project and the younger children saw the older ones actually speaking really great English which proved a good motivation. Parents also saw their children speaking English and acting. The younger grades made shadow pictures with black paper and moved these around on white paper taking pictures with the digital camera to make little books and story displays for the English bulletin board with little English comments underneath - dialogue and explanations. I still show these movies when I talk to groups about Greenland.

Hi,

I wanted to let you know that I am doing a podcast using Archie comics. I have a Learning Guide that goes with it. I hope that it will help you with your students and with making your lesson plans.
If you have any suggestions on how I can improve the podcast, please let me know. http://www.archiecomics.com/podcast

Again, I hope this helps.
Patti AKA ESLarchie

Hello all,

I am an illustrator from upstate New York and have an online comic strip entitled, "The Man Who Broke 1,000 Brains," found here:

http://www.russell-richardson.com

If you think it has merit, please feel free to use the strip for teaching purposes.

Thank you,
RxDx