“Manga as a Language Learning Tool: Potential Implications”

With globalization and increasing access to the Internet, language learners have gained access to previously unimaginable amounts of texts of different types and genres, such as manga, or Japanese comics online. This has led to growing interest among researchers on the ways in which reading and writing practices can include new media, visual and multimodal literacies, as well as an engagement with popular culture (Jewitt, C. & Kress, G., 2003). This talk will highlight the potential of manga as a language learning tool. We will outline the principles of the extensive reading approach (Day and Bamford, 1998), review relevant empirical findings, and discuss the potential of manga to engage learners in extensive reading. We will specifically focus on a number of issues that may arise from using these texts, such as problems in reading paths, since manga, often even in translation, is read from right to left, much like the Japanese way of reading manga.  We will conclude with a discussion of our in-progress eye tracking study, in which we explore on how differences in reading paths in manga may affect learners’ reading behaviors, their affectional states, as well as text comprehension.

Room 509, Building2 , Sophia University