Exelsior! Teaching ESL with comics and cartoons

I owe a big chunk of my robust vocabulary to the creators of the Incredible Hulk, Batman and the Swamp Thing.

Comics and cartoons are a great teaching resource for the ESL classroom. Even higher-level students can be intimidated by a thick paperback book. But show your students a page or two from Spider-Man and they'll dig right in.

Some excellent sites with resources that can be cut and pasted from the web (at least for educational purposes, since most sites have copyright that prevents use for commercial or promotional activities) are:

Yahoo's Comics and Editorial Cartoons page: a roundup of all the popular syndicated cartoons: Doonesbury, Dilbert, Garfield ('Garfield?' Who still reads that? How many freaking jokes can you make about a morbidly obese cat?).

The Marvel Comics home page, including cover art, some pages with dialogue and some without and loads of information about all sorts of classic Marvel characters - Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, the X-Men and more. Stan Lee, you are the man.

The DC Comics home page, including cover art, some pages with dialogue and some without and loads of information about all sorts of classic DC characters - Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and more. Pure genius.

One thing to be careful of, though: from what I've seen, comics like Batman, X-Men and the Incredible Hulk that had fairly simple storylines when I was younger now have complicated storylines that are difficult to follow and may even have "adult" themes. Make sure the pages you give your students for reading practice can be readily understood within their own context without necessarily knowing the back-story.

One way to get around that problem is to just find comic pages that don't have any dialogue - or just print out the complete page and use white-out to manually remove the confusing passages. That works better anyways for creative writing exercises, where your students can fill in the word balloons to create their own story to match the visual context. This can be a really fun exercise for students. Same goes for writing captions for political cartoons.

tags: comics, cartoons, comic book, word balloon, fun activities