Activity Name: Teaching With Cartoons

Purpose: At the most basic level, cartoons can be the basis for creating basic dialogues.  They can also be used for practicing grammatical structures, vocabulary and for reading and writing practice.

Preparation Time:  10-15 minutes

Materials:  Cut a cartoon strip out of a local paper. Next, take some white-out or a corrector pen and remove the dialogue in the frames. Photocopy enough strips for the entire class.

Preparation: If your learners aren’t familiar with cartoons, you might want to show them the newspaper, where the comics are located, and how the story moves from one frame to the next, left to right or top to bottom.

Procedure:

1. Model a dialogue, so learners understand what you are asking them to do.
2. Then pass out the photocopied cartoons and ask students to write their own dialogue in the open spaces.
3. If time permits, ask students to read their dialogues to the other students.

Variations:

·      Cut out a cartoon strip and remove key vocabulary items or grammatical structures with white-out or a

corrector pen. Ask students to make educated guesses about the missing vocabulary words or structures. Let the students compare their answers with each other.

·     Ask students to cut out a cartoon strip from the paper every day for a two week period. Ask the students to paste each cartoon on a separate piece of paper. Next, ask the students to rewrite the dialogue in the past tense or in the future.