The Use of the Comic Novel in Primary Education

Abstract

The new digital culture increasingly relies on the right hemisphere of the brain, while traditional literacy has so far strengthened the left hemisphere of the brain (Gyarmathy 2011; cited by Szalay 2016). In a comic book, it is possible to synthesize writing and imagery, verbality and visuality (Szalay 2016). Some researchers, who examined more abstract and complex scientific thinking, did not find a significant improvement in the knowledge of the studied students when reading and using comic books (Spiegel et al. 2013; Ahmad et al. 2017; Rofii et al. 2018; cited by Phoon et al. 2020), while others observed a significant improvement (Lin et al. 2015; cited by Phoon et al. 2020). They all agree that children like reading comics, they are influenced by the visual appeal of the graphic presentation, the reading of comics effectively influences and positively shapes the students' attitude and commitment to science, thus comics can be an effective tool for education. In our research, we prepared a questionnaire survey on the frequency of comic book use in education and its areas of use among teachers working in primary schools. In the interviews, we mainly sought for an answer as to what proportion of teachers use comics as an educational tool and method in education, as well as for which subjects and how often they do so. The questionnaire was distributed primarily in a format published on social media platforms, in various professional groups, with the help of an external practice institution and using a snowball method to share with teachers who voluntarily and anonymously undertook to fill it out. The number of respondents was 96. Our results are not representative.