A Look over the Wall: Using the Graphic Novel drüben! to Teach Linguistic, Literary, Cultural, and Visual Skills

Abstract

This article discusses the potential and challenges of teaching a second‐semester German class with Simon Schwartz's graphic novel drüben! () alongside a traditional textbook. While the class explored linguistic, literary, and cultural‐historical aspects of drüben!, a GDR‐themed family memoir, the focus here is on those pedagogical interventions which dealt with the training of visual literacy. The article outlines how instructors can use the novel to not only familiarize students with the depicted cultural artifacts and practices, but also to introduce them to the visual language of comic books and culture‐specific traditions of visual representation more generally. Sample lesson units and exercises are provided along with reflections on what worked and on ways to overcome the shortcomings that were encountered. One such shortcoming was the gap between students’ passive and active language capabilities, which one could bridge by providing (comic book) specific Redemittel. Even though adding or focusing on visual literacy requires substantial effort on both the students’ and the instructor's side, comics and graphic novels offer a holistic and not least motivating way of training language, cultural, and visual skills.

Comics as a multimodal resource and students’ willingness to communicate in Russian

“…Comics, which also subsume graphic novels (Thomas 2011), are defined in this study as a medium, a 'hybrid word-and-image form in which two narrative tracks, one verbal and one visual, register temporality spatially' (Chute 2008, 452; for approaches or guides to using comics, see Elsner 2013;Issa 2018;Monnin 2010). Studies show that comics can help develop learners' critical literacy (Chun 2009), knowledge of culture and history (Chisholm, Shelton, and Sheffield 2017), and linguistic structures (Ludewig 2017), media literacy (Cook 2017), and cross-disciplinary literacy (Park 2016). Comics also promote meaning-making and aid teachers in lessening students' cognitive load when acquiring vocabulary through reading activities (McClanahan and Nottingham 2019).…”