Form and sequence: comic books and visual literacy in narrative tenses

Visuals are often used in presenting language concepts with the pedagogical rationale that visual, non-linguistic support can serve to make such concepts comprehensible across linguistic boundaries. Comic books contain conventions related to visual design as well as visual content which, it has been argued, denote durations of narrative time. This paper starts with the proposal that such conventions might be used then to present narrative tenses. However, such a project depends on relative literacy in comic book conventions among language learners. This qualitative research study involved creating a comic book story which integrated comic book conventions to represent certain durations of time to teach different past tenses. The outcome was that only with a small number of conventions was there general agreement on meaning in an experimental group, whereas with other conventions multiple interpretations were provided. Furthermore, with a specific convention which did have agreement, namely frame order, a significant difference existed in understanding the sequence of past perfect and past simple between the experimental group using the comic book and a control group working without visual support.