Literacy Research Association Conference
Dallas, TX, December 5, 2013
Dawnelle Henretty
John McEneaney
Re-creational Reading: Reassembling Comics a Meaning Making
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to explore the four-panel comic, a popular culture literacy artifact that is a
longstanding tradition with American readers. Observing how readers reassemble the separated panels
of comics might suggest a grammar of comics, and identifying that grammar could provide insight into
how readers comprehend multimodal texts and how educators could use that insight in the classroom to
develop and strengthen comprehension and writing skills.
Perspectives/Theoretical Framework
 Schema Theory (e.g., Anderson, 2004; Bartlett, 1932; Gordon & Braun, 1983; Rumelhart, 1980)
claims that readers rely on the many schemata they experience to create meaning with each new
text, adding to prior knowledge.
 Transactional Theory (Rosenblatt, 1978, 2004) tells us that meaning is made when the reader
engages in a transaction with the text. The author supplies the text from which the reader makes
meaning; however, consistent with the author-reader transaction, there is no guarantee that only
one meaning is possible. This study distinguishes between author-defined meaning, represented
by the panel sequence the author creates, and reader-defined meaning, determined by how
readers place comic panels into a narrative consistent with prior knowledge and panel content.
 Comics scholars have provided a working lexicon for identifying visual devices – images and
symbols – that arguably contain grammatical structures similar to those found in words-only
texts (Cohn, 2007, 2010; McCloud, 1993). Comprehension of comics relies in part on what
inferences readers make between panels, and comics scholars have looked at the transitions
authors build into adjacent panels.
Methods/Techniques
Twenty University students and staff were
prompted to reassemble the scrambled panels in
four separate four-panel comics to create comic
strips consistent with what they would expect in a
comic strip. After completing each comicordering task, participants were asked to think
aloud (Ericsson & Simon, 1994), telling the
researcher what motivated their final panel
arrangement. Video and audio (ELAN) (Helwig,
2007) captured each participant’s physical
manipulation of the comic panels and the thinkaloud. Panels were assigned numbers 1 to 4 to
match author’s order, and codes were annotated on
ELAN. A designation of “42” indicates that
panels 4 and 2 were placed side-by-side in that
order. A “1234” code signifies an exact match to
the author’s strip. Final panel arrangements were
compared to the author’s, and the think-aloud
portion was intended to qualitatively reinforce the
quantitative findings.
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Literacy Research Association Conference
Dallas, TX, December 5, 2013
Dawnelle Henretty
John McEneaney
Data Analysis/Results
Are some comics more difficult to order than others?
Distance score and time to completion served as dependent variables in a general linear model (GLM
repeated-measures ANOVA (Howell, 2010; Rutherford, 2001). The distance score was a sum of
squares error score based on differences between participant- and author-selected positions. Results
indicated significant differences in error scores, with significant differences in both the general test
(Hotellings Trace F(3,17) = 49.247, p < .001, η2 = . 897) and in the within-participants test corrected for
possible violation of the sphericity assumption (Huyhn-Feldt F(2.677,656.413) = 41.485, p < .001, η2 =
.686) with observed power of 1.0 in both tests. See Table 1. The time to completion analysis was
conducted to detect significant differences between comics in the time taken to finish the task of
arranging the panels (Hotellings Trace F(3,16) = 3.795, p < .05, η2 = .416) and in the within- participants
test corrected for possible violation of the sphericity assumption (Huyhn- Feldt F(2.209,4456.244) =
5.377, p < .01, η2 = .230) with observed power of .707 and .84, respectively. See Table 2.
Are all panel positions equally likely to result in an author match?
A second repeated-measures ANOVA was run using mean numbers of author-matching panel
placements in each position as the dependent measure. Results indicated significant differences in both
the general test (Hotellings Trace F(3,17) = 35.009, p < .001, η2 = .861) and in the within-participants
test corrected for possible violation of the sphericity assumption (Huyhn-Feldt F(2.989,56.797) =
22.239, p < .001, η2 = .539).
Discussion
Significant differences in error scores indicate that some comics are more difficult to order than
others. The think-alouds reinforced those findings: participants often identified with one character and
created panel arrangements consistent with their own ideas about human behavior. This indicates that
understanding a comic strip relies on both prior knowledge and an interpretation of the clues the author
uses to communicate with reader.
Probabilities that panel placement matched the author in positions 1, 2, 3,and 4 were 34%, 30%,
48%, and 68%, respectively. As in many other reading tasks, it is clear that increasing availability of
context tends to support convergence on a shared meaning. Four-panel comics tend to be understood as
adhering to a specific schema, with intro, follow-up, set-up, and punch line/resolution panels. We might
explain the results by surmising that a panel in the 4th (punch line) position would be the easiest to
identify, followed by the punch line set-up.
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Literacy Research Association Conference
Dallas, TX, December 5, 2013
Dawnelle Henretty
John McEneaney
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