Comics provide narrative experiences for students just beginning to read and for students acquiring a new language. Students follow story beginnings and endings, plot, characters, time and setting, sequencing without needing sophisticated word decoding skills. Images support the text and give students significant contextual clues to word meaning. Comics act as a scaffold to student understanding.
As Stephen Cary, a second language learner specialist and author of Going Graphic: Comics at Work in the Multilingual Classroom, says: “Comics provide authentic language learning opportunities for all students…. The dramatically reduced text of many comics make them manageable and language profitable for even beginning level readers.”
Also according to Cary, comics motivate reluctant readers. They engage students in a literary format which is their own. Comics speak to students in a way they understand and identify with. Even after students learn to be strong readers comics give students the opportunity to read material which combines images with text to express satire, symbolism, point of view, drama, puns and humor in ways not possible with text alone.