Effects of Comic Strips on Reading Comprehension and Written Retelling

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the effects of visual aids on EFL learners' reading comprehension and a written retelling based on the Dual Coding theory and working memory. A comic strip was presented with the reading text together. The participants were 120 second-grade Japanese junior high school students. The participants were divided into four groups: two high and low proficiency groups each given a reading task with or without the comic strip. Two-way ANOVAs were run on the data from reading comprehension and written retelling task. In the written retelling, the recall protocols value, the lexical richness and the propositional representations were analyzed. The findings revealed that the groups with the comic strips scored significantly higher than those who read the text without the comic strips in all measures except the lexical richness. In addition, providing the comic strips enhanced the low-level students' reading comprehension and the written retelling task. The findings indicated that the visual aid reduced the learners' cognitive load in reading and promoted the retention of the text in retelling task.