Comic Books Improve Early Childhood Literacy

Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that Professor Carol Tilley, a professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois, says that comics are just as sophisticated as other forms of reading, children benefit from reading them at least as much as they do from reading other kinds of books, and that there is evidence that comics increase children's vocabulary and instill a love of reading. 'A lot of the criticism of comics and comic books come from people who think that kids are just looking at the pictures and not putting them together with the words,' says Tilley. 'But you could easily make some of the same criticisms of picture books – that kids are just looking at pictures, and not at the words.' Tilley says that some of the condescension toward comics as a medium may come from the connotations that the name itself evokes but that the distinct comic book aesthetic — frames, thought and speech bubbles, motion lines, to name a few — has been co-opted by children's books, creating a hybrid format."

Comments

Also foreign language learning. . .

[bogidu]

I lived in Spain for a year, spoke/read very little spanish when I moved there and read alot of x-men comic books. They did help me pick up vocabulary and common expressions and such. Anyone who things that any form of reading cannot help just due to it's content is just being prejudicial against the material.

Medium, not genre

[tverbeek]

Comics are not a genre.

Westerns, science fiction, romance, mystery, autobiography, war, superheroes, etc. are genres.

Comics are a medium - like films, prose, poetry, songs, or plays - one capable of telling stories in any genre. The problem is that the mediums of comix is so closely associated in our current culture with funny-animal stories for children and superhero stories for adolescents, that people don't realise what the medium is really capable of, especially its ability to be sophisticated enough to engage intelligent adults. But name any popular genre, and I can name a comic book series or graphic novel that tells a story in that genre.