Dialoguing on a Graphic Novel in the Language Learning Classroom with Upper Secondary School Students

Abstract

Drawing on a larger project on teaching Swedish as a second language to migrant upper secondary school students in Sweden, this paper focuses on one teacher’s literature class and a book-group discussion about a graphic novel based on Selma Lagerlöf’s A Tale of a Manor. The aim was to contribute to further knowledge on the dialogic potential of teacher-led literary discussions on graphic novels with language learners, by focusing on the cumulative aspect of the interaction. We also analyzed the teacher’s role and how it affected the students’ responses and interpretations. Our findings show how the cumulative dialogue created new student insights relating to the novel’s protagonists, literary themes and the saga genre, which is central in Lagerlöf’s novels, and how literary concepts and visual cues were used as resources for interpretation. The discussion of the graphic novel included multifaceted and multimodal analyses, in which the teacher urged the students to formulate interpretations and responses anchored in both the written text and the images. This teacher-led dialogue holds great potential for encouraging students’ literary reading, as well as their confidence when it comes to giving responses to literature, which is of relevance to similar language and literature teaching contexts.