Teaching with Cartoons

Purpose: At the most basic level, cartoons can be used to practice sequencing and to create simple dialogues. They can also be used for practicing grammatical structures, vocabulary and for reading and writing practice.

Preparation Time: 10-15 minutes.

Materials: Cut a cartoon strip out of a local paper. Next, take some white-out or a corrector pen and remove the dialogue in the frames. Photocopy enough strips for the entire class.

Preparation: If your learners aren’t familiar with cartoons, show them the newspaper, where the comics are located, and how the story moves from one frame to the next, left to right or top to bottom.

Procedure:

1. Model a dialogue, so learners understand what you are asking them to do.
2. Then pass out the photocopied cartoons and ask students to write their own dialogue in the open spaces.
3. If time permits, ask students to read their dialogues to the other students.

Variations:

• Cut out a cartoon strip and remove key vocabulary items or grammatical structures with white-out or a corrector pen. Ask students to make educated guesses about the missing vocabulary words or structures. Let the students compare their answers with each other.
• Ask students to cut out a cartoon strip from the paper every day for a two week period. Ask the students to paste each cartoon on a separate piece of paper. Next, ask the students to rewrite the dialogue in the past tense or in the future.

Note: Use cartoons, comic strips, and comic books to teach quotation marks. If text is in a word balloon or thought balloon, it goes inside the quotation marks. If it's not in a word or thought balloon, it goes outside the quotation marks.

Variations for higher level students:

1. Categorizing – Have small groups of students collect comic strips and then sort them into categories, e.g. family, romance, animals, etc. Ask students to discuss and justify the categories they’ve chosen.
2. Determining the main idea – Distribute selected comic strips and ask students to reach consensus on the main idea of each strip.
3. Comparing and contrasting – Have students compare and contrast sets of comic strips in term of character types, conflicts, resolutions, style, etc.
4. Identifying cause and effect – Ask students to identify the problem, the characters involved, and the resolution of the problem.
5. Predicting outcomes – Ask students to read all the frames in a comic strip, except the final one. Have them predict how the strip ends, then compare their version with the original.

Fun resource: Bill Zimmerman, a former newspaperman, has created a website that lets you write and illustrate your own comic strips. Check it out!