Using Cartoons
Updated: Dec 4, 2021
Want authentic English? Start with a cartoon. I'll be posting a series of cartoons taken from "The New Yorker Book of Cartoon Puzzles and Games" published by Advanced Magazine Publishers, Inc. in 2006. Full disclosure - I have not received permission from the publisher to reprint these cartoons, so use at your own risk, and certainly don't use them for profit!
The human brain is designed to remember stories, so combining stories with foreign language learning is one way to get that language to stick. Newspaper comics are bite-sized stories, designed to tell a larger story with only a few pictures and words. As such, they are ideal for use in the short time we have in the classroom.
Take the following image for example. The pictures are scrambled. Imagine engaging your students by having them communicate with each other about the pictures, put them in the correct order, and then use them to tell a story. And then have a good laugh!
Here are a few more to play with:
