Sessions /
Graphic Novels for EFL #1350

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.