Abstract

The creative use of comics in teaching world literature, having a distinct feature of teaching using graphic arts, pictures, and speech balloons, tends to measure reading comprehension and vocabulary skills. For students, reading seems to be easy and natural to perform. Still, it requires understanding and identifying unfamiliar words on what students have read, which is notoriously tricky because of its complex nature. Hence, this study explores the use of new instructional material such as comics to enhance the students’ reading comprehension and vocabulary skills. Results showed differences between the reading comprehension and vocabulary skills’ pre-test and the post-test of the students, indicating that skills improve with the use of comics as instructional material in world literature. The correlation result does not affect the acceptability and effectiveness of the comics-based instructional material. Therefore, the measured skills have no impact on the efficacy and acceptability of the designed instructional material. However, one result undervalue reveals that using comics delivers moral lessons to the readers and increases the students’ comprehension and vocabulary skills.  It appears that using comics-based work text in teaching world literature improves the students’ reading comprehension and vocabulary skills at the same rate, delivers moral lessons effectively.

Keywords: literature, comics, worktext, comprehension, vocabulary