the power of images

As part of my haul from Barnes and Noble, I brought back 2 copies of a graphic novel called Big City Otto (http://readingyear.blogspot.com/2011/09/graphic-novel-week-big-city-otto.html). I bought it because I was interested to see if graphic novels made for a more engaging read for some of my students, and also if students might be able to read novels at a slightly higher difficulty level than they would with full print text because the pictures give them a greater context to understand the plot and challenging vocabulary words. I hadn't decided which pair of students I would experiment with this book, so I just had the 2 copies on the radiator behind my desk. On Thursday, as we were independent reading I noticed 2 boys, Tyshaun and Rashad, huddled next to each other in the library, reading Big City Otto together. I interviewed them, asking first of all, how they had discovered the book and why they were drawn to it. They responded that they saw the cover looked interesting and funny. When I started asking them questions about what the book was about, what the conflict was, etc. and I noticed that their comprehension was not perfect, but they were able to use the pictures as scaffolds. Say for example, they couldn't remember a character's name, they could point to it in the picture or describe it's appearance. Now, I do think as a next step I need to teach them the nuances of reading graphic novels. But first, I need to know what those nuances are. I mean, I have read many of graphic novels before and never really thought about how I had to process information differently. I guess the biggest difference for me was that there wasn't usually a formal narrator, and if there was, the narration was very limited (if only by space). The pictures are the real narrator in this genre. They tell you the who, what, where, and when. How does this inform their comprehension? What are the pitfalls of this genre in boosting comprehension? Staying tuned...