The roles of comic strips in EFL classroom: a meta synthesis

Comic strip is a visual media frequently used to facilitate English classroom teaching-learning activities, as it offers complete features combining pictures and text. An increasing number of research articles explore comic strips to enhance students’ skills and knowledge, emphasizing the need for a deeper investigation into their role in language learning. Hence, this study intended to explore the roles of comic strips and investigate the features of comic strips used to support the English teaching and learning process in English classrooms. This research used a meta-synthesis method to synthesize the findings across selected research articles, which can provide an interpretative and understanding perspective that helps bridge prior and current studies discussing comic strips. The data was gained from 21 primary articles with theoretical or empirical research discussing comic strips in English for Foreign Language classrooms collected from several databases. The data were chosen based on the criteria set to select the most relevant research articles. The findings showed that there are seven roles of comic strips, including attracting students’ attention, facilitating communication skill practice, helping retention and recall, entertaining, helping to deliver information, facilitating classroom instruction, and increasing students’ involvement. Moreover, there are five beneficial components or features of comic strips offered that can be utilized to learn English, including characters, pictures, narrations, stories and plots, word balloons, and sound effects or onomatopoeia. The teacher can adapt and modify the features to use them maximally to aid the teaching and learning process.