Comic Books - Images, Words and Language Acquisition : Using comic books as an alternative material for teaching the English language.

• Main Author: Egelström, Christian
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Högskolan i Halmstad, Akademin för lärande, humaniora och samhälle 2018
• Subjects: Languages and Literature; Språk och litteratur
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-38159

The purpose of the research described in this essay is, by analysing the content of comic books, to (1) evaluate comic books as material for teaching, (2) if possible, to create an exercise that could be used in the classroom in which comic books are used for teaching ESL and (3) to suggest innovative material and related tasks that could be used to introduce students to issues related to meaning, with the focus on “literal or speaker meaning”, “multimodality” and “deixis”, and drawing upon principles and concepts described within the disciplines of semiotics, semantics and pragmatics. Accordingly, the thesis questions of this essay are described as follows: If possible, how could comic books be used in the classroom as an alternative material for teaching the ESL? If possible, how could comic books be used to introduce students to issues related to meaning through linguistic approaches, with the aid of semantics, semiotics and pragmatics?  Comic books, in theory and in practice, could be used in the classroom as an alternative material for teaching the English language and introduce students to issues related to meaning through linguistic approaches, with the aid including semantics, semiotics and pragmatics. Furthermore, the material used in this essay is just a small fraction of possible material that is available to teachers, and there are numerous ways of using comic books in teaching aspects of language from varied perspectives.