Speak of the bubble – constructing comic book bubbles as literary devices in a primary school classroom

Abstract

This article investigates teachers’ and pupils’ use of speech and thought bubbles in a classroom literacy project involving comics. Through studying video data on naturally occurring classroom interaction whereby participants in Grade 3 (ages 9–10) talk about bubbles, the aim of this article is to increase knowledge of how bubbles are constructed as devices of literacy. The analysis focuses on the action-oriented aspects of discursive psychology: emphasis, word repetition, uptake and the use of signs, symbols, and text in the comics. Results show how participants negotiate combinations of shapes, symbols and text to construct common knowledge concerning bubbles. Furthermore, teachers use pupils’ drawn bubbles, adding to them a variety of multimodal expressions, thereby illustrating how narrative focalization and character prosody are constructed in the reading of comics. The study of how bubbles are constructed contributes to a larger theme of studying classroom instruction using comics as resources for doing literacy.

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