This article investigates teachers' and pupils' use of speech and thought bubbles in a classroom literacy project involving comics. Through studying video data on naturally occurring classroom interaction whereby participants in Grade 3 (ages 9-10) talk about bubbles, the aim of this article is to increase knowledge of how bubbles are constructed as devices of literacy. The analysis focuses on the action-oriented aspects of discursive psychology: emphasis, word repetition, uptake, and the use of signs, symbols, and text in the comics. Results show how participants negotiate combinations of shapes, symbols, and text to construct common knowledge concerning bubbles. Furthermore, teachers use pupils' drawn bubbles, adding to them a variety of multimodal expressions, thereby illustrating how narrative focalization and character prosody are constructed in the reading of comics. The study of how bubbles are constructed contributes to a larger theme of studying classroom instruction using comics as resources for doing literacy.

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This article combines theory on comics, narrative, and discursive psychology and analyses how the gutter is co-constructed for storytelling in classroom interaction. Closure of the gutter has previously been treated as a cognitive aspect. Here, interactional video data are analysed, with participants organizing ten separate comic panels. The analysis focuses on participants' talk about the gutter, and how this constructs social actions. The results show how participants co-construct the gutter as meaningful space, hereby organizing time, actions, and events in narratives. The paper evinces that gutters are co-constructed as too narrow or too broad, relating chronologically and logically to surrounding panels. This contributes to sociocultural perspectives on literacy and use of comics for engaging with narratives in classroom practice.

The aim of this article is to increase knowledge on the use of comics as materials in K-9 education (ages 6–15). This is achieved through an integrative research review. Reference lists and websites have been searched, both by database searches and manually, and the results analysed and cross-referenced to identify common areas of research and possible gaps in knowledge. 55 texts (research articles and doctoral theses) were found, with 40 first authors from fourteen countries. The results revealed several gaps in knowledge. Most of the analysed studies had been carried out in North America, which suggests that more studies in other educational contexts, published in English, are needed, and that cross-national studies of comics in education will be productive. Furthermore, only three of the analysed texts describe studies that have high ecological validity, while all of the remaining 52 studies were ‘staged’ studies, in which the researcher had introduced material and observed the results. This suggests that further studies that utilize non-experimental research methods are needed. Finally, most studies focus on students’ reading preferences in regard to comics, rather than, for example, on how students compose comics or what they learn through comics. Thus, further studies that explore student work with comics, and examine the kinds of knowledge that reading comics enables, are desirable.

This paper analyses and discusses ongoing comics literacy events where two 3rd Grade students and their teachers are working with comic books, focusing specifically on visual representations of sound. The purpose of the paper is to explore how these representations, as multimodal aspects of comics literacy, provoke literacy experiences in the classroom. Visual representations of sound come in different shapes and sizes, but are generally written outside of speech bubbles in bold letters. Using discursive psychology –allowing the researcher to view participants’ verbal and embodied actions as performing actions in social and situated contexts– the current paper analyses how pairs of students and teachers co-construct visual aspects in comic books, translating them into verbal sound and embodied action. Results show that embodied motion, sensation, and audible sound are utilized to interactively display comic sound effects to enhance the reader’s experience of the narrative. This is done as co-construction between adult and child through re-enactment of the visuals as real-life sound and action –also connecting this to other visual aspects of adjacent panels in order to make this meaningful. The paper argues that this challenges both teachers’ and students’ perceptions of what literacy can be and how sound effects –through the shape, colour and font of the graphic text– influence and enliven the comic narratives created in the classroom.