Grade 7 students reading graphic novels: ‘You need to do a lot of thinking’

Abstract

A multifaceted, classroom‐based research project explored how developing Grade 7 students’ knowledge of literary and illustrative elements affects their understanding, interpretation and analysis of picturebooks and graphic novels, and their subsequent creation of their own print texts. Analysis of two sources of data, the students’ written responses to Amulet (Kibuishi 2008 Kibuishi, K. (2008) Amulet book one: The stonekeeper. New York: Scholastic Inc. [Google Scholar]), one of the graphic novels read and discussed during the study, and the students’ opinions about the knowledge that is required to read and understand a graphic novel, indicated how the instruction about various graphic novel conventions had impacted the students’ awareness of and knowledge about the structural design of these multimodal texts.