The purpose of this research is to improve informative and narrative writing skills of middle school students. The study was designed with action research. The research group is middle school students. Data collection techniques were student diary, semi-structured interview form, semi-structured observation form and documents that consist of…

The author explores the possibilities that posthumanist thinking offers for amplifying our understanding of multimodality in children's literacies in school and beyond. Drawing on data from a five-month case study on the multimodal literacy practices of six fifth-grade students across home, community, and school settings, the author focuses on one…

Since the beginning of literary time, genre has been an issue for critics and scholars. Comics and graphic novels have stepped into the fray in recent decades causing even more confusion. This is even more evident in Spain where the publishers are foolhardy men and women simply out to make money and who are too deeply embedded in their bourgeois…

"Manga" are graphic novels that are considered to have the potential to effectively convey concepts and engage readers. The efficacy of "manga" has been validated for chemical safety education to students in three universities in Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand. Students were asked to examine a photo to identify hazards and…

This research is motivated by the lack of teachers' ability to use media related to the students environment as teaching materials to develop primary school students' critical thinking ability. The research aims at developing problem-based learning media (PBL) using comic book in order to improve students' critical thinking ability. The research…

A 2018 study conducted by the independent, non-profit organization The Commission on Fake News and The Teaching of Critical Literacy Skills reported that only 2% of children have the literacy skills they need to determine if a news story is real or fake. Over 50% of the teachers in the study believe that current curriculum does not equip children…

Teachers and students require a range of tools to engage with visual texts. Using "The Great American Dust Bowl" by Don Brown (2013) as an exemplar text, we outline four conceptions of visual literacy: rhetorical, instructional, industrial and visuo-spatial and discuss their use in our literacy education practice. In addition, we provide…

Science and storytelling have an uneasy relationship. The scientific community frequently disdains stories, seeing them as polluting the purity of objective communication of data. In the peer-review process, for example, scientists who tell stories with their data are seen as "embellish[ing] and conceal[ing] information to evoke a response in…

This article is an international reflection on literacy, creativity, and student engagement. The authors collaborated to help Nigerian youths and their teachers develop, design, and share original comic books. By leveraging student engagement for literacy learning, the authors highlighted the crucial role of creativity in the classroom. The…

This study investigated the constructs underlying second language (L2) word association (WA) with regard to three dimensions of lexical competence--size, organization, and accessibility--and the lexical performance of speech. One-hundred and thirteen Japanese learners of English completed a computer-delivered oral WA task along with three…

This article examines students' identities in teacher-student interactions during an eight-week comic unit within a fourth-grade literacy classroom. Though researchers have increasingly studied how teachers incorporated graphic novels and comics into the school literacy curriculum, few have documented the social interactions that students'…

When it comes to teaching vocabulary in foreign language classes words are often taught in isolation, without regard to the context in which they appear. The paper draws attention to the importance of teaching words in context so that the meaning of a word often results from the meaning of a larger construction it is part of. After presenting the…

In this study, we examine evidence of transfer from reading instruction to students' learning of language arts and historical content as demonstrated by their independent writing and growth in background knowledge. We taught a unit in a sixth-grade language arts classroom in which students learned about design elements of graphic novels (e.g.,…

The researchers in this qualitative case study explored the dialogic experiences of elementary school students during Comic Book Club meetings held in their local community resource center. The researchers wanted to know what experiences of dialogism were manifested in children's conversations about reading, writing, and comic creation and what…

This article outlines research that explored how pre-service science education teachers drafted multimodal artifacts, namely graphic novelettes (short versions of graphic novels) to help explain science concepts to varying grade levels. The research methodology and collaboration of the project, which included both Science Education and English…