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From Aliteracy to Literacy: Developing Visual Skills to Develop

Verbal and Reading Skills; a Case Study.

Antonios Stergiou

Dear audience

Twelve years ago, I started teaching literature -a language course par excellence- at a

small Junior High School with roughly one hundred and twenty students and I used to

follow the formal curriculum. All of the students come from eight different villages in

the Rhodope Mountains and they belong to the Muslim minority of the Northern

Greek. At the beginning, the educational process was extremely strenuous for me,

because most of the students were not fully fluent in Greek and their cultural horizons

were limited. Over the last three years, I have used a variety of flexible strategies for

teaching literature, under the implementation of a pilot program for the education of

the Muslim minority in Thrace. As far as I am concerned, the suggested texts of

literature of this program improve the syllabus and they are appropriate for the

children of the Muslim minority. Furthermore, the program itself helps the teacher to

build a "literature-bridge", which could improve students’ verbal communication and

reading skills, reducing teacher’s frustration and the gap between the pupils of the

minority and the majority.

The previous school year (2013-2014), under the pilot implementation of the

above program in the subject of Literature of the 7th

grade, the teaching unit “Words

and Pictures: The Comics” was my first choice. I thought that the humorous tone and

the marvel drawings of the comic characters could draw my students’ interest and

give them the opportunity to express their thoughts. I was also hoping that the short

texts of the speech bubbles could boost their reading comprehension and, maybe, the

students could overcome the aliteracy, the state of being uninterested in reading, since

reading is slow and frustrating for them. Among my students, there was a schoolgirl

from a remote small village. She had already been rejected from another school in the

nearby town because of her low grades, when she was enrolled again in the 7th

grade

of my school.

At the beginning of the teaching unit, the schoolgirl was reluctant to verbally

express personal ideas and views and she didn’t know anything about the techniques

of the comic strips. Gradually, she noted and she comprehended techniques such as

the panels, the speech and the thought bubbles, the pictorial representation of sound

effects, the difference between the fonts, the punctuation and the facial expressions of

the characters of some short comic strips about school life and she felt self confident.

As a result of this feeling, the schoolgirl coped with the stress of reading aloud with

the appropriate intonation; she read out loud a story of a 4-panel comic strip and she

retold the story in her own words. Additionally, after a little thought, she changed the

text of the speech bubbles and she told a real new funny story.

Consequently, the schoolgirl, through a series of individual and teamwork

activities of text transformation exercises, actively approached the prose and the

poetry. Initially, she understood the plot time of a longer story of an 8-panel comic

strip, whose panels were scrambled and speechless but they obviously referred to the

relationships between adults and adolescents. Then, she recounted the events of the

main story in a different order from their chronological sequence and afterwards she

wrote a short humorous narrative text based on these panels. This way, although she

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was more familiar with the linear narratives, she empirically comprehended the most

common literary device, the technique of the non-linear ones.

Moreover, the schoolgirl defeated her reluctance through collaborative

learning environment in the classroom. She felt like a valued part of a teamwork

group and she participated in the dramatization of the main story of a 16-panel comic

strip about the parent-teen relationships; actually, she was the leading actress of the

little improvisational play. In addition, she and her teamwork group, at first, read a

short story from the school anthologies that is currently used. Then by using the

software of “Toondoo”, to which they accessed on-line in the classroom, they

converted a scene of this narrative to a 2-panel comic strip. Also, due to her fluency in

Turkish, she essentially helped her group to understand the meaning of the

magnificent Turkish poem, titled "The little girl"(Kız Çocuğu), which is translated

into Greek. This poem is written by Nazim Hikmet and it is translated by the Greek

poet, Giannis Ritsos. In the end, in a drawing and coloring activity, they successfully

depicted the main anti-war message of the poem.

By then, the student had been practiced only in short texts of comic strips and

literature. The opportunity for long-form narratives was given to her through a comic

book for young people published by the European Commission in 1998 and titled

"The Raspberry Ice Cream War", a comic about a peaceful Europe without frontiers.

The schoolgirl read the whole comic book at home and, in spite of her initial

unawareness about the European Union, she considered the place of this political and

economical partnership in the world. As a part of her teamwork group, she identified

the current young people’s conflicting opinions about the European Union based on a

recent poll survey. Furthermore, the fictional three main characters, two boys and one

girl, inspired each member of her group to write a fictional story of their own. She

finally wrote a short fiction story- she had heard the main story from her

grandparents- and she read it out in the classroom, receiving positive feedback.

At the end of this teaching unit which expanded for three months, the

schoolgirl took on the responsibilities of a stage director, during a classroom project.

She read in comics the comedy “The birds”, at home. The comedy is written by the

ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes and it is about a pair of friends who had united

with the birds to find an idyllic city in the clouds. She undertook to cut out and glue to

some paperboard sheets the most meaningful and distinctive panels of a scene -the

scene had been chosen by her teamwork group- in order to shorten the scene of the

prototype comic book. Due to this playful way, all the classmates finally created their

own version of the comedy demonstrating the level of their reading comprehension

and highlighting their critical literacy to distinguish important from less important

information.

And what is happening now to that schoolgirl? She continues to pass the

bridge and she still ascends the steep road that connects our school, the Gymnasium

of Sminthi, and the village; but actually she started hearing the sound of the river

below the bridge, a pleasant sound that she had never heard of before. Developing

visual skills, she managed to develop and improve her verbal and reading skills. Only

time will show if she will be an efficient reader.

And what happened to that pilot educational program for the children of the

Muslim minority of Northern Greek? The effects of its implementation will be

continuing. The beginning has already been made.

Thank you very much for your attention. Antonios Stergiou

Greek Literature Teacher