My Child Will Only Read Graphic Novels. Help.

Graphic novel are used in the high school setting for reluctant readers, poor readers, etc.

Once we get the student engaged in books...graphic novels included then you teach them the skills needed to advance/transition over to more complex reading material.

Chunking those skills is a necessary step in learning.

Kathleen-
I have no problem with decodable texts being used within a phonics lesson to provide students with some concentrated practice with the skills being taught. However, I have written about the dangers of limiting children's reading to decodables, research evidence does not support the idea of limiting children' reading to those texts.

thanks.

tim

Shawna
There is more to reading than vocabulary. The words in comics are often sophisticated but the syntax rarely is and telling a story through pictures and dialogue is structurally a rarity in academic text. I guess it depends what you’re preparing kids for.

Good luck.

Tim

My husband wanted to add, “ A picture is worth 1,000 words.” If a story can be told with a stick figure that would take 1oos to describe, who wins? Conveying another person’s thoughts is the goal.

My son pointed out that reading isn’t for endurance reading is for knowledge. He said that for people who do not visualize well while reading graphic novels fills that need, he has Ef challenges. My husband is dyslexic and he pointed out that the context of pictures provided meaning to the words he read. He has read all of the classics but it was slow going for him. He understood them he doesn’t have difficulty with concepts or complex thought he has difficulty reading the words. He said he reads in context to the words around the word he doesn’t know. It really is difficult for a dyslexic person to enable a non-dyslexic person to understand how the experience of reading is different for them. That is why so many go into artistic, entrepreneurial, or engineering based careers. Many dyslexic people think in pictures and in those professions that is an asset.

Shawna—
That’s backwards... what science shows is that people visualize when they read words... they don’t need to visualize when pictures are provided.

Tim

As an educator who has worked with young learners for many years, I feel like one thing that can be overlooked is providing the opportunity for students to find their passions. Allowing students to choose their own content or genre for independent reading is a small way that we can allow them to "deep dive" into areas of interest. I do agree about exposures to other areas through text as well. What a great way to help support them in finding their next passion!

In my youth, I enjoyed comic magazines (e.g., Classic Comics, Disney's monthly, etc. Also Captain Marvel and others, up to about age 12. In addition, I read "children's books" by A P Terhune and others. My mother continued to read to me in evenings to age age 13, when we moved from Milwaukee to Bethesda, MD. That was a change of life. (My parents reunited at that time.)
I do think my mother's reading helped forward my education. She read everything from Kipling to Sherlock Holmes to a book on ancient history.
Cheers, Andy Biemiller

In my youth, I enjoyed comic magazines (e.g., Classic Comics, Disney's monthly, etc. Also Captain Marvel and others, up to about age 12. In addition, I read "children's books" by A P Terhune and others. My mother continued to read to me in evenings to age age 13, when we moved from Milwaukee to Bethesda, MD. That was a change of life. (My parents reunited at that time.)
I do think my mother's reading helped forward my education. She read everything from Kipling to Sherlock Holmes to a book on ancient history.
Cheers, Andy Biemiller

Andy--
I was happy to hear how your mother allowed you to enjoy your comics while she expanded your opportunities to enjoy other kinds of books (and I suspect your vocabulary).

thanks.

tim

Tim -
Please say more about visualization, if you could! While visualization gets a lot of mentions in literacy, I don't know if it's fully appreciated as a comprehension strategy or even as a life skill. I've found it to be transformative on both fronts personally, and always tried to get students to draw and discuss their visualizations while reading. What are your thoughts? Am I overestimating this particular strategy?

Tim -
Please say more about visualization, if you could! While visualization gets a lot of mentions in literacy, I don't know if it's fully appreciated as a comprehension strategy or even as a life skill. I've found it to be transformative on both fronts personally, and always tried to get students to draw and discuss their visualizations while reading. What are your thoughts? Am I overestimating this particular strategy?

Tim -
Please say more about visualization, if you could! While visualization gets a lot of mentions in literacy, I don't know if it's fully appreciated as a comprehension strategy or even as a life skill. I've found it to be transformative on both fronts personally, and always tried to get students to draw and discuss their visualizations while reading. What are your thoughts? Am I overestimating this particular strategy?

Dr. Shanahan, I am a regular reader of your blog and always appreciate your honest answers that clearly delineate between which of your statements are research based and which are your educated opinion! My one beef today is that I would say that a varied diet of text is critical but you can absolutely learn a lot about our world from graphic novels and comics--even superhero ones. They reveal much about our world today, who we are, and who we are striving to be.

Melissa--

My point isn't that graphic novels have no value, that certainly isn't the case. However, they provide students a very narrow lens through which to explore their world and expanding children's horizons beyond that lens makes sense. Not replacing it, but expanding it.

thanks.

tim

Joe--

Visualization has been found to be an effective reading comprehension strategy. Guiding students to try to "see" (with their mind's eye) what is happening in the texts that they are reading can improve understanding and recall of information. To be effective, students need to do the visualizing however. There are studies that compare watching a story on television and reading that story and the readers evidence much greater brain activity than the viewers; presumably in part because they have to conjure up their own images for what is going on. Graphic novels do this work for the readers -- which reduces the effort needed (but also alters the processes needed when one is reading other kinds of text).

thanks.
tim

Amazing article! What do you think about using phonemics for early reading as young as two? I saw an interesting video about it: https://bit.ly/3obKmCl

Dr Shanahan,

I really enjoyed reading your post, and feel like you bring up some great points about the value of traditional texts as well as some of the potential befits of reading graphic novels. Nevertheless, I feel like your appreciation for graphic novels as a form is a bit limited. There are a few reasons I say this. I am currently investigating graphic novel construction using a literary geography methodology. I am also a teacher of high school literature, and a writer of both graphic novels and more traditional novels.

The other night, I was talking to my 8 year old daughter about texts (a topic we've discussed since she was old enough to speak, and a reflection of my own obsession with narratives in all forms). We were discussing the idea, quite popular in research about digital games, that there is such a thing as active and passive texts. The reasoning goes that, on one side, we have texts such as novels and films, over which the reader had no control and which are therefore considered relatively passive, while on the other we have games, which can be viewed as falling anywhere on a spectrum of interactivity, and which are therefore considered active.

It was at this point, however, that my daughter stopped me, and pointed out that novels are not passive. She mentioned that, when she reads, or when I read to her, she has to use her imagination to picture the characters and setting. Of course, she was quite right, and this describes the visualisation you referred to in a couple of your messages to other respondents. I would add that she is also making predictions, deductions, sifting what is literally true from what is meant metaphorically or even ironically, comparing this story to others with which she is familiar, and so on. There is no reason, however, to draw the distinction, as you have, between the value of one text type, in this case novels, and another, such as graphic novels/comics.

In your response to your reader's question, you likened graphic novels to ice cream, the implication being that they are akin to a sweet treat lacking nutritional value ... that they cannot constitute a meal in themselves. This view is one that many felt was put to bed when Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize for 'Maus' in 1992. You also write, 'Let’s face it, kids weren’t going to learn a lot about our social or natural worlds from Archie or Superman', a claim that does not take into account the capacity for a reader, along with an engaged and informed other (parent/teacher/mentor) to engage thoughtfully with the subject matter or to question the views and values it presents.

'Superman' can be viewed as an allegorical tale for immigration, and can elicit conversations about inclusion/acceptance and their opposites; while 'Archie' can be viewed as a snapshot of post-War American values and critiqued accordingly. Both can be compared and contrasted with works of their respective subgenres, using a thematic approach, in which the reader (as young as primary/elementary school age) can explore how the world has changed, and how it has remained the same, according to comics. Or these can be approached from a more formalist standpoint, with the kid introduced to the correct language used to describe verbal/linguistic, visual, and structural features, and encouraged to describe these features. These approaches and others have been shown to be successful tools in getting young readers to read and even write multi-modal texts. When doing so, the child is demonstrating higher order thinking abilities.

Due to their relative accessibility, such books can act also as an engagement strategy for readers who don't come from backgrounds where their parents have bookshelves filled with classic novels. In a project I co-ran with colleagues in Australia and the United States called Comics Go Global, we worked with kids from all different backgrounds, some with learning delays, to analyse comics in this way, before the kids collaborated and created comics of their own, sometimes working in multiple time zones as one wrote the story, another drew the characters, and a third wrote the dialogue. It was amazing to see the insight and creativity shown by the students, and the breadth of the issues and topics they chose to depict in their own works. This pilot project was presented to the Geographical Society, and saw more than 100 kids 'graduate' with a greater appreciation of how to read, write and draw comics over its 4-year run.

What I'm saying, essentially, is that I think having conversations in which we promote the idea that there is a hierarchical model of text types, with novels at the top and other texts beneath, is ultimately doing our kids a disservice. I would never question the value of getting young people to read novels, but nor would I steer them away from other text types. Instead, I would like to see our conversations about these texts change from a deficit model to one that recognises them as a legitimate and complex forms of literature unto themselves.

All the best,

Luke

Luke--
You make a very good case for the quality of graphic novels. Nevertheless, I would still try to expand kids' horizons beyond them. I don't know what you mean in this context by a deficit view, but I definitely believe that encouraging kids to only read one type of book (or to engage in only one type of cultural activity) may create very real deficits in the long run. I admire Maus as much as anybody (just as I admire Joyce's Ulysses), but I think there is more to reading than either of them -- and I wouldn't turn them over to my 8-year-old grandkids. You kept your comments to literary texts and I think that, too, is a mistake.

Good luck.

thanks.

tim

Dr. Shanahan,
Thank you for writing about this. I have noticed this trend more recently of mid- to upper-elementary students primarily consuming a diet of graphic novels for their independent and leisure reading, and having difficulty shifting to chapter books with less visuals. As someone who's worked with students with reading comprehension issues and understanding the important role of visualization and working memory to read with comprehension and on working memory, I too have wondered about the effects of a prolonged diet subsisting of only graphic novels since this genre does not require the reader to engage and grow in these cognitive processes compared to non-graphic novels. And not that reading comprehension state tests and other benchmarks are the end goal, but simply, they are a reality in the world of education, and test passages usually consist of text only. All that to say, I think that viewing consuming primarily graphic novels as a "lost opportunity" is a great way to frame it. Thank you again for sharing your thoughts on this!
Julia Yi