Comic books in Quechua have become an important and innovative teaching resource for a language that requires new approaches to achieve its desired massification.
Many claim that the origins of comics go back to Stone Age cave paintings, as evidenced by the discoveries that have been made in many places around the world. However, comics as such appeared at the end of the 19th century in the United States, when the two most important newspapers of the time decided to use them to increase their sales.
From then until today, the comic strip is still in use. There is no newspaper that does not include in its pages some comic strip, either of renowned cartoonists or of artists who start with some characters that little by little can be accepted by the reading public of the written medium.
The comic strip appeared in the United States at the end of the 19th century
COMICS AND EDUCATION
In general, when talking about comics, it is very common to take into account only the production received from commercial presses, which are produced and distributed with the purpose of obtaining a direct profit on sales.
However, since comics are an entertainment medium, with a great predominance of graphics, which allows the inclusion of texts with a simple language, they have also been used for popular education processes.
Thus, for example, the first educational comic book magazines were published in the United States, around 1940, such as True Comics, Real Life Comics and Real Fact Comics, and they were anthologies of comic books about famous people from world and American history, literary figures and historics events.
On the other hand, in France, for example, the Larousse publishing house achieved great commercial success by publishing "L'histoire de France en BD", reaching 600 million copies in just seven years.
In Brazil, comic strips have also been used for teaching, knowledge transmission, dissemination of religious dogmas or for civic purposes, such as the biographies of famous figures in Brazilian history.
Comic strips have also been used in popular education processes.
LEARNING LANGUAGES WITH COMICS
According to what we have referred to above, the use of comics is not only limited to entertainment, it is possible to use them for educational purposes, as would be the case with language teaching.
The use of comics for language teaching has great advantages: for students, it makes learning easier; for teachers, it provides them with a powerful pedagogical tool. In 2007, the conference "The comic book in the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language, E/LE" was held in Spain. There, several experiences on the use of comics as a tool in the classroom were disseminated and the experiences of teachers who had used them to train other teachers in private language academies were presented.
QUECHUA IN THE CARTOON
Given this experience of the use of comics for the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language, it is possible to do the same in the teaching of Quechua. Even more so if additional resources are used, such as adding animation and audio to the dialogues in this language.
In the following link you can see an example of the use of comics as a didactic resource for the teaching of Quechua. It is a dialogue between three characters, on the first day of Quechua class (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEZrFIu6leY)
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