PLAY COMIC: how to enhance writing skills?

Writing is generally a challenging task for students and, for some of them, even boring. If we add the difficulty to do it in other language rather than their mother tongue, it may become a highly demanding task. In this sense, comics have been always playing an important role aiming to encourage students towards reading and writing.

Comic edition, two languages available (English and Spanish), graded activities, lots of pre-designed characters, scenarios, speech bubbles and other small details, support and feedback offering... and totally free! These are just a few advantages that PLAY COMIC offers us.

This is a very intuitive software which intends to be a helpful tool with high expectations. It can be very useful considering several aspects, such as:

• Developing both receptive and productive written skills.
• Enhancing motivation towards reading.
• Promoting correctness, neatness and coherence when producing written texts
• Infering meaning from the context.
• Promoting non-verbal language through pictures (gestures, movements, emotions, speech bubbles…)
• Increasing the vocabulary in daily life situations, so it becomes meaningful.
• Appreciating and valuing the target language as a means of real communication, interaction and socialisation, and not as a mere subject.
• Enjoying with language learning while playing with language.
• Fostering creativity and imagination through edition, illustrations and storytelling.

When it comes to its applications, it suggests five different possibilities: design a comic from scratch, continue one considering 14 graded stories according to three different levels, fill the speech bubbles in a comic already illustrated,  turn a story into a comic or, on the contrary, turn a comic into a story.

Once they have created their comic, it can also be saved and even printed. Subsequently, we can gather all the students’ productions and turn them into a book for the classroom library to share it as a collaborative material in which all of them have participated.

As I said before, its interface is very intuitive, but, just in case, here you have a tutorial.

Hope you like it!

C U SOON!