Speak of the bubble – constructing comic book bubbles as literary devices in a primary school classroom

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• classroom interaction
• comics
• discursive psychology
• literacy didactics
• speech bubbles

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, and direct a special thanks to Carly Butler, Derek Edwards, and the DARG group at Loughborough University for their invaluable input and support on the early drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Henceforth, the term comics is used for all manner of comic books, comic strips and graphic novels.

2. As the current article does not directly take part in this debate, these are only a few examples of the literature that does. For those who are interested, I recommend Gene Yang’s website and History of Comics in Education as a starting point: http://www.humblecomics.com/comicsedu/history.html.

3. The original language of the classroom is Swedish, and all transcripts have been translated by the author and proofread by a professional translator. The English translation has been kept as close as possible to the original language, representing the ungrammatical nature of spoken language.

4. For a review of verbal/visual transcriptions, see Laurier (2014); for other examples of graphic transcripts, see Haddington and Rauniomaa (2014), Ivarsson (2010), Lindwall, Lindström, and Bernhard (2002), and Lindwall and Ivarsson (2010).

5. Donald Duck panels in the excerpt are © DISNEY, and are used with permission.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lars Wallner

Lars Wallner is a PhD student in the field of Pedagogic Practice at Linköping University. He has an MA in Education and English Literature and has an avid interest in education, social interaction, and comics.