It was determined that a more systematic approach to teaching and assessing visual textual conventions would enhance understanding of the text. Results show that the text provided visual text structural cues that provided important information to readers about literary conventions such as setting and timeframe, foreshadowing, symbolism and the like. Data sources were compiled and analyzed documenting the teachers’ interpretations of the visual images and understanding of the text before, during and after the reading of the text. Participants were 40 teachers within the context of graduate school coursework on teaching multicultural literature and the language arts. It also studied the supports and challenges of an Internet-based instructional sequence in supporting the viewers’ comprehension of this text. This teacher research inquiry investigated the text structural supports and challenges in reading and understanding Shaun Tan’s award winning visual narrative, The Arrival. This could symbolize any of a number of difficult circumstances, either economic, political, environmental, or personal. Throughout this brief initial journey, we witness a menace that hangs over the city, depicted by a spiked dragon’s tail.
He then walks to a train station where he bids farewell to his wife and daughter. This six-part story starts with a man, with ethnically ambiguous features, taking final stock of his surroundings and packing his suitcase as he prepares to leave his home. They transform what might on the surface seem to be a conventional narrative into a complex, multi-layered, and evocative treatment of the experience of migration. A 130-page wordless graphic novel that took Tan four years to complete, The Arrival is remarkable in the richness and emotional power of its illustrations. It also follows a familiar trajectory of ‘departure, passage, arrival and eventual assimilation into the host society/culture’ (Hron 2009 in Bjartveit and Panayotides 2014: 253). The story of migration told in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival is a fortunate one.
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