Creative Activity: Captioning Comics

This activity is a great way to encourage students to use their imaginations. You can even introduce some English comic strips to make your classes more cultural.

The process is very simple: Give students comic strips with the dialogue blanked out and have them fill in the missing dialogue. If they aren’t familiar with the characters and their relationships to each other, you might want to explain this; however, it might promote greater creativity if you allow the students to come up with their own impressions!

The following examples are from 3^rd Year students at Hashima High School from 1997. Strips of U.S. cartoonist Charles Shultz were used as the basis of these examples.

Note: This activity originally appeared in the 1997 edition of Communicative English: A Practical Guide.