The narratives produced were then rated by two independent raters. After reading the same story, the children retold the story in English. They were randomly assigned to one of the three experimental conditions that differed in the format of story presentation: English text, English text with pictorial illustrations or graphic novel.

A total of 51 Chinese elementary school children, aged 7–8, who were learning English as a second language were recruited. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether similar multimedia effects can be observed in second language learning and graphic novel reading. Past studies have shown that multimodal presentation of story can improve story-retelling performance in the first language. Guidelines for further researches and work in the classroom are provided. Using comics at the primary level of education has proved to be very complex and should be explored and planned by taking into account primary level students' age and abilities. Our predictions were based on researches carried out on samples of older students while results obtained are based on younger students and have shown the use of comics in the classroom must be designed differently than anticipated. Comics as a literary-didactic method were implemented in current educational practice at Slovene and Art lessons in order to verify its effect on reading literacy, attitude towards reading, reading motivation, and reading interests. We designed a program of using comics as a literary-didactic method in class and we have examined its effect on reading literacy at the primary level of education.

The sample consisted of 143 students from second to fifth grade from two Slovenian primary schools in a rural environment, of which 73 students participated in the experimental group and 70 students in the control group. The main purpose of study was to verify quasi-experimentally the effects of using comics as a literary-didactic method for reducing gender differences in reading literacy at the primary level of education. Reading literacy is a type of literacy composed by various factors affected by teacher's observance of modern principles, guidelines and selection of methods used in class that represents the difference between achieving or not achieving objectives set in curriculum. Literacy is one of the basic skills of the individual need for effective function in modern society. Differences between genders in school environment often occur in the field of reading literacy. A doctoral dissertation discusses the use of comics as a literary-didactic method for reducing gender differences in reading literacy at the primary level of education.

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