USING CARTOONS TO

TEACH

Why using cartoons

In a single image, a cartoon can make us smile, make us laugh, or even make us sigh and shake our heads.Appeal to the Child in Us.  For most of us, children and adults alike, cartoons are appealing.  We feel we are entering a dream, a fantasy world, and that we are escaping from everyday reality.

Cartoons are colorful and amusing.  Therefore, if we teachers want to use a cartoon or part of one as a stimulus for some language activity in the classroom, we already have the students' willing attention. Even with students whose native language is English, using animated versions of well-known stories can give the more unwilling students their first exposure to literary classics and perhaps even stimulate them to pick up the book.

POSITIVE FEATURES

Negative Features of Cartoons

No Clues from Visual Articulation.  One way in which video helps in comprehension is that it often lets us see the speaker's mouth, from which we get clues as to what sounds or sequences of sounds the speaker is producing.The characters' mouths are made to move in imitation of real people, but the subtle movements of lips, tongue, and jaw that help us identify speech sounds even when we cannot hear them are completely missing.

Good teachers always spend some time introducing the topic of the lesson.  Often our pre-teaching activities bear a relationship to our purpose for using the materials.  For example, when we use a cartoon as part of a unit on a particular topic, such as the Halloween holiday, the cartoon may be only one of a series of materials illustrating various aspects of that topic.

Activities

Reading a Transcript.  If there is a story worth understanding, Particularly for longer cartoons, we may want to prepare a complete transcript for one or more scenes and have students take the roles before viewing. 

ActivitiesCloze. Because the language of cartoons is rather unnatural, students need some extra help in comprehending it. 

Reading a Transcript.  If there is a story worth understanding, Particularly for longer cartoons, we may want to prepare a complete transcript for one or more scenes and have students take the roles before viewing.

Performing a Mini-Play. If students have a complete transcript of a story, a cartoon or that of another genre such as a situation comedy, they can act it out in mini-play style.