This case study describes how a literature teacher in Greece helped improve the literacy skills of a reluctant student from the local Muslim minority. The teacher used comics and visual learning strategies to boost the student's reading comprehension and engagement. Over time, the student became more confident participating in class activities like reading aloud, role playing, and creating her own comic adaptations. She went from being unable to express herself verbally to writing and sharing her own short stories. This showed how developing visual skills through comics can help develop verbal and reading abilities for students struggling with aliteracy or low literacy.

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From Aliteracy to Literacy: Developing Visual Skills to Develop
Verbal and Reading Skills; a Case Study.
Antonis Stergiou
MA Linguistics and Literature
Twelve years ago, I started teaching literature -a language course par excellence- at a small Junior
High School with roughly one hundred and twenty students and I used to follow the formal
curriculum. All of the students come from eight different villages in the Rhodope Mountains and
they belong to the Muslim minority of the Northern Greek. At the beginning, the educational
process was extremely strenuous for me, because most of the students were not fully fluent in
Greek language and their cultural horizons were limited. Over the last three years, I have used a
variety of flexible strategies for teaching literature, under the implementation of a pilot program for
the education of the Muslim minority in Thrace. As far as I am concerned, the suggested literature
texts of this program improve the syllabus and they are appropriate for the children of the Muslim
minority. Furthermore, the program itself helps the teacher to build a "literature-bridge", which
could improve students’ verbal communication and reading skills, reducing teacher’s frustration
and the gap between the pupils of the minority and the majority.
The previous school year (2013-2014), under the pilot implementation of the above
program in the subject of Literature of the 7th
grade, the teaching unit “Words and Pictures: The
Comics” was my first choice. I thought that the humorous tone and the marvel drawings of the
comic characters could draw my students’ interest and give them the opportunity to express their
thoughts. I was also hoping that the short texts of the speech bubbles could boost their reading
comprehension and, maybe, the students could overcome the aliteracy, the state of being
uninterested in reading since reading is slow and frustrating for them. Among my students, there
was a schoolgirl from a remote small village. She had already been rejected from another school in
the nearby town because of her low grades when she enrolled in the 7th
grade of my school.
At the beginning of the teaching unit, the schoolgirl was reluctant to express her ideas and
views verbally and she didn’t know anything about the techniques of the comic strips. Gradually,
she noted and she comprehended techniques such as the panels, the speech and the thought
bubbles, the pictorial representation of sound effects, the difference between the fonts, the
punctuation and the facial expressions of the characters of some short comic strips about school
life. Hence, she felt self-confident. As a result of this feeling, the schoolgirl coped with the stress of
reading aloud using the appropriate intonation; she read out loud a story of a 4-panel comic strip
and she retold the story in her own words. Additionally, after a little thought, she changed the text
of the speech bubbles and she told a real new funny story.
Consequently, the schoolgirl, through a series of individual and teamwork activities of text
transformation exercises, approached the prose and the poetry actively. Initially, she understood
the plot time of a longer story of an 8-panel comic strip, whose panels were scrambled and
speechless but they obviously referred to the relationships between adults and adolescents. Then,
she recounted the events of the main story in a different order from their chronological sequence
and afterwards she wrote a short humorous narrative text based on these panels. This way,

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although she was more familiar with the linear narratives, she empirically comprehended the most
common literary device, the technique of the non-linear ones.
Moreover, the schoolgirl defeated her reluctance through collaborative learning
environment in the classroom. She felt like a valued part of a teamwork group and she participated
in the dramatization of the main story of a 16-panel comic strip about the parent-teen
relationships; actually, she was the leading actress in a brief improvisational play. In addition, she
and her teamwork group read firstly a short story from the school anthologies that is currently
used. After that, by using the software of “Toondoo”, to which they accessed on-line in the
classroom, they converted a scene of this short story to a 2-panel comic strip. Also, due to her
fluency in Turkish language, she essentially helped her group to understand the deeper meaning of
a translated into Greek language Turkish poem, titled "The little girl"(Kız Çocuğu). This poem is
written by Nazim Hikmet and it is translated by the Greek poet, Giannis Ritsos. In the end, in a
drawing and coloring activity, they successfully depicted the main anti-war message of the poem.
By then, the student had been practiced only in short texts of comic strips and literature.
The opportunity for long-form narratives was given to her through a comic book for young people
published by the European Commission in 1998 and titled "The Raspberry Ice Cream War", a comic
about a peaceful Europe without frontiers. The schoolgirl read the whole comic book at home and,
in spite of her initial unawareness about the European Union, she learned about this political and
economic partnership. As a part of her teamwork group, she identified the current young people’s
conflicting opinions about the European Union based on a recent poll survey. Furthermore, the
fictional three main characters -two boys and one girl- inspired each member of her group to write
a fictional story of their own. She finally wrote a short fiction story -she had heard the main story
from her grandparents- and she read it out in the classroom, receiving positive feedback.
At the end of this teaching unit which lasted three months, the schoolgirl took on the
responsibilities of a stage director, during a classroom project. She read the comedy “The birds” in
comics at home. The comedy is written by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes and it is
about a pair of friends who had been united with the birds to find an idyllic city in the clouds. She
undertook to cut out and glue to some paperboard sheets the most meaningful and distinctive
panels of a scene -the scene had been chosen by her teamwork group- in order to shorten the
scene of the prototype comic book. Due to this playful way, all the classmates finally created their
own version of the ancient comedy demonstrating the level of their reading comprehension and
highlighting their critical literacy to distinguish important from less important information.
And what is happening now to that schoolgirl? She continues to pass the bridge and she still
ascends the steep road that connects our school and the village; but actually she started hearing
the sound of the river below the bridge, a pleasant sound that she had never heard of before.
Developing visual skills, she managed to develop and improve her verbal and reading skills. Only the
time will show us if she will be an efficient reader.
And what happened to that pilot educational program for the children of the Muslim
minority of Northern Greek? The effects of its implementation will be continuing. The beginning has
already been made.
September 2014

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These are the photos from my classroom that inspired me to write this case study; the schoolgirl of
my case study is the one with the Islamic headscarf.
photo 1
photo 2

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photo 3
photo 4