A student centered reading approach : the use of comics-based reading tasks to enhance comprehension

(Profesor de Inglés para la Enseñanza Básica y Media y al grado académico de Licenciado en Educación)Throughout this study we were aiming to prove that comics are effective and complete devices to be used in English lessons. Students feel motivated by this type of text which is based in images and literary texts. Because of this, the severa! discourses present in comics enhance reading comprehension which sometimes becomes a problem for teachers and students as well. However, in order to prove this fact, it was necessary to discover which discourses present in comics help young students with a lack of knowledge about the target language in the hard task of comprehending the text in a successful way. To achieve this goal, 17 students from three different schools were asked to read a 68-page comic book. Afterwards, they were interviewed individually in order to identify which discourses facilitated comprehension, the discourses that made comprehension difficult, the discourses that called students' attention, and finally, to see if they could comprehend the text as a whole. The results were absolutely positive for our purpose. First of ali, students felt motivated with this type of text, and that was demonstrated by the good will they showed after reading the comic in answering the questions. Furthermore, we were able to prove that the iconographic elements present in this type of text were crucial for the understanding of the plot, while just few elements impeded full comprehension. This means that the benefits of using this type of text regarding levels of comprehension are many. Finally, it was stated that 77% of the students got a high level of comprehension, a good percentage for students who had a basic knowledge in the matter. Concluding, comics are effective devices to be used in English lessons for teenagers with reduced knowledge about the grammatical or lexical elements of the foreign language