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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."
There's an art to reading graphic novels, and knowing how to read them. To analyze the frames for relative action to the story and so on. I for one have never been as good at understanding comics as I have traditional literature.
What a coincidence. I was just thinking about my dad -- ordinarily a highly intelligent person -- and how he once told me how disappointed he was that I was reading comics, because "I'd forget how to read real books," or some such nonsense. (I was probably about 14 at the time -- a crucial time of life, apparently, when the danger of literary alopecia lurks around every corner.)
What pop seemed to have forgotten was that a large part of the reason why I was reading three or four grades ahead of my class when I first started school was because A.) I had seen the movie Star Wars, and B.) that meant I needed to immerse myself in every Star Wars thing I could possibly get my hands on, especially including comic books.
Remember, there was no way to just watch your favorite movie at home in those days. One of the main ways to get my daily fix of the Force was to revisit the saga in comic book form. And it turns out this was actually a very efficient way to learn how to read. Consider: Having seen the movie in the theater about seven times already, I had pretty much memorized all the lines. The dialogue in the comic books wasn't exactly the same, but before long I could easily follow along with the simple lines and expository captions.
These days I'm revisiting the same trick, reading Franco-Belgian graphic albums as a booster for studying French. My brain is far less able to pick up languages these days than when I was a kid, but the same rules apply with modern French comics as with those Star Wars comics from the 70s, for the most part. The things characters say aren't usually all that complex, and the pictures often give you a hint as to what they might be saying. You can even pick up idioms and colloquialisms that you might not normally be exposed to by a textbook.
I'm glad to see someone's actually doing the research, though. It's probably the only way you would ever convince my dad.
Breakfast served all day!
I had the same experience when the Peace Corps sent me to French West Africa. French books use different tenses than spoken French. We spent three months learning French. I could order a meal, rent a car, etc, but I could not carry on a conversation. A friend suggested I buy some French comics. They are all written is 'spoken' French. It helped me a lot. I would suggest to anyone learning a foreign language to read comics in that foreign language. Terry
Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?
Not particularly. Asterix at its best has jokes for everyone. (And spotting the puns is good fun for french students!)