At the start of the term we started to read a new book in our English class: An Inspector Calls. I didn’t know much about this play at all but I knew there was a copy of the Classical Comics graphic novel adaptation of it at home - so I took it along to class.
Our teacher handed out copies of the play script (we got one between two) and assigned the main character roles to some students to read those parts. Only those students who volunteered to read were chosen so nobody was forced to read if they didn't want to. I didn’t volunteer. ;-) There were only a handful of roles anyway as there aren’t many characters in the play. When we began to read it, some students read their parts in funny accents which made the whole class laugh.
As I had the graphic novel with me, I had it open alongside the play script and this helped me to quickly get to grips with the characters and easily work out their feelings and emotions. My teacher didn’t mind. He looked at the graphic novel and said “That looks interesting!” The graphic novel doesn't include stage directions though, so it got confusing at times when those were read out but I quickly got used to that. And, at times, some of the character’s exaggerated expressions in the graphic novel made me and my reading partner giggle.
After reading a short section of An Inspector Calls (the number of pages varied each time) we watched a clip on YouTube of the same section in order to compare the performance to the script. I think this was to help us understand the characters and storyline better.
Then, after that, our teacher asked us questions just on the section that we had read. He also told us not to read ahead until the next class so we could work through the book a section at a time. It was tempting to, but I didn’t. I think this is so we could all work at the same pace and find things out together.
The same thing happened each lesson. We read a bit, watched a bit and answered questions. The same students didn’t read out loud every lesson. Other students got the opportunity to read if they wanted to. Some students kept the same parts.
Sometimes we did group work where we worked in either pairs or fours to answer questions and we shared our answers with the other groups in our class.
At the end of the half term (8 weeks and about 15 lessons later) we had an assessment. We needed to create a ‘what, how, why’ paragraph about how one of the main characters, Mr. Birling, contributed to the death of Eva Smith. I felt confident in my answers.
In our last lesson we watched the movie production of An Inspector Calls which gave a lot more information about who Eva Smith was and about her life.
I liked using the graphic novel in class because it helped me to understand each character’s emotions and tone of voice just by looking at the pictures.
I think all the students could have benefitted from having access to a copy of the graphic novel in class because it was like watching the scenes instead of just reading the play. It would have been especially useful if we weren’t able to watch a film or video too.
I would recommend the graphic novel and I would recommend all future books that we read in class have a graphic novel version either instead or as well as the play scripts to help us quickly understand the scenes.
An Inspector Calls was an interesting play and I felt I covered it quite thoroughly using all the media available to me - script, graphic novel and film.
HP - age 14