Sessions

Graphic Novels for EFL

Shaun Tan's graphic novel, "The Arrival”, contains no words. Due to its visual nature, it is accessible, and it also engages readers' critical thinking skills due to its themes about immigrant and refugee experience. Van Amelsvoort explores the many ways in which images not only help learners to memorise new content, but that they are often more effective than text in this aim (2013). Furthermore, visuals can engage students’ top-down processing far more rapidly than the written word, in that our schematic knowledge can often recognise the meaning behind images even when we do not know the foreign definition for them, thereby easing the burden of comprehension and performance that many learners face with new content (Hadley, 2001). An advantage of using this graphic novel was the immediacy students felt relating to text and topic. The contents were used on a week-by-week basis—one part of the story revealed after the other—to teach a semester-long first-year seminar course. Students undertook a number of tasks and group work, including analysis, storytelling, prediction, tense exploration, role play, and performance to deepen their understanding of the text and global issues, all the while improving communicative competence through language use. This short presentation will outline some of the steps taken to successfully teach a graphic novel in an EMI or elective EFL class, and some of the disadvantages. Attendees will learn of some ways that they can implement and incorporate similar texts into their own classroom experiences.

LiLT Forum

In any classroom, including a language teaching setting, teaching literature is not just a means to increased vocabulary or grammatical constructs. Literary texts can be fairly linear with simple plots or richly ambiguous with a myriad of interpretations that require the reader to sift through the fine nuances of language. Some texts provoke the reader to ask, and more importantly attempt to answer, questions; perhaps questions the reader had never pondered. What criteria beyond language learning drives your choice of text? Perhaps there are cultural aspects that the text captures, or provocative story lines that challenge our beliefs. What deeper issues do you hope to raise with your students? In this LiLT forum, we would like to address this topic. Presenters will explain their criteria for text selection as well as other relevant issues. Integral to the forum's success is audience participation; questions and insights will be solicited and greatly appreciated. Non-members and LiLT members alike are encouraged to attend and enrich our friendly and inclusive forum.