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This research explores the potential value of online comics in Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) education for nonbackground learners in the context of Australia. Mixed research methods, quantitative and qualitative, were adopted to investigate the affordances of online comics in CFL education, examining their effectiveness in improving students’ word recognition ability and exploring how students’ attitudes towards online comics influence their word recognition ability. During the time of the research, when the researcher was a teacher-researcher in the research school, data was collected from 60 students and one mentor teacher, through pre- and post-tests, artefacts, survey questionnaire, interview, and the teacher-researcher’s self-reflective journals. It was found that online comics’ affordances were connected with the characteristics of meaningful learning, which afforded CFL teaching and learning by showing it as usable with everyday life content, by making it useful through online comic creation, and by creating a fun and conducive teaching and learning environment in the classroom. In addition, the quantitative data analysis indicated that as the main teaching and learning method, the strategy of using online comics to teach Chinese characters may have improved their word recognition ability. Moreover, students’ attitudes towards online comics had significant influence on their Chinese word recognition ability. Students’ perceptions of online comics’ effectiveness, regardless of year and gender, were found to be related to their improvement in word recognition ability. On the other hand, students of different years and genders had different preferences towards online comics, and such preferences had different influences on their word recognition ability. Specifically, Year 6 students’ perceptions of online comics increased their motivation and were found to influence improvement of their word recognition ability. Girls’ opinions of thinking online comics were interesting in CFL learning were found to influence their improvement in word recognition ability. This thesis hopes to illuminate online comics in CFL teaching and learning. The findings of this research suggest the importance of adopting effective teaching approaches that align with students’ preferences.

Comics, graphic novels, and manga differ appreciably from textual narrative formats, and materials with increasingly visual elements have found their way into progressive and student-centered library collections. But many educators and librarians still resist inclusion of graphic narratives in school libraries and devalue the reading practice of students who prefer more visual texts. Using the framework of radical change, which posits that both text conventions and reader expectations for text are increasingly multimodal as they possess characteristics of evolving digital media, this study considered the relationship of the characteristics of text individual students prefer, particularly those they select from the school library, and their attitudes towards aspects of reading practice as evidenced through the Adolescent Motivation to Read Profile instrument. Survey data was supplemented with circulation history from the library management system to inform a correlational study punctuating attitudinal differences based on reader preferences. Findings include high school students who engage with graphic narrative text formats reporting more favorable views of libraries and reading. There is a demonstrable distinction in attitudes between students who prefer more visual text when compared with peers with more traditional print affinities. Student engaging with graphic narrative texts also report more frequent engagement with text overall. These demonstrated relationships should help to legitimize the inclusion of more graphic narrative text formats in school library collections.

The depictions of women in film noir and neo-noir have long been objects of interest for feminist scholars. In this report, I extend this scholarship to examine Frank Miller's Sin city graphic novel series as a version of neo-noir that is both intimately connected to noir tradition and innovative in its approach, specifically in terms of his representation of women. Miller depicts his female characters in a variety of ways that reflect both the positive and negative imagery of women in classic noir and neo-noir; in doing so, he creates a new and complex vision of women in noir. This report uses three different characterizations of women in film noir--the spider woman, the femme moderne, and the angel--to explore the ways in which Miller's female characters can be understood to simultaneously uphold and challenge these conventions.

The problem of this study is to compare certain elements of appeal in favorite comic books and favorite books of fiction read by 384 ninth-grade pupils in the J. P. Elder Junior High School, Fort Worth, Texas, during a three-months period from November 7, 1949, to February 7, 1950. The purpose of this investigation is to ascertain whether the same elements of appeal are common to both types of reading, and whether they compare favorably with the findings of other investigations reported in literature on the subject.