Do Comics and Graphic Novels Help You Learn English?

By The Dobi Apps Team · Published 2026-09-11 · Originally published at dobiapps.com

Comics pair pictures with text, and research on that combination found EFL learners scored 45% higher after multimodal study than after text-only study.

In short: Comics and graphic novels help learn English because they pair text with pictures, and pictures give context for guessing an unfamiliar word’s meaning. A controlled study of English learners found a 45% higher score after studying with text-plus-picture material than with text alone, and a separate study found a graphic-novel group outperformed a text-only control group on reading comprehension.

Hero image: Story Book - English App, App Store listing.

Why Do Comics Work for Learning English?

Comics combine written text with pictures in the same panel, and that pairing gives a reader two sources of meaning instead of one. A word a reader does not know can often be worked out from what the picture shows, the same guess-from-context mechanism that makes comprehensible input effective, but with a visual clue standing in for some of the surrounding sentences a prose text would otherwise need to supply that context.

This combination has a name in reading research: multimodal input, meaning information delivered through more than one channel at once, in this case the verbal and the visual. Comics are not the only multimodal format, audio paired with text is another example covered in how reading while listening to audiobooks builds English listening fluency, but comics are one of the few formats where the second channel is present on every single page rather than running in the background.

Comics also compress dialogue. A comic page fits far fewer words per panel than a prose page fits per paragraph, which pushes writers toward shorter, more direct sentences and toward idiomatic, spoken-sounding English rather than the more formal register a textbook passage tends to use. That gives a reader repeated exposure to natural spoken patterns in a format that a picture already helps make sense of.

What Does Research Say About Comics and English Reading Comprehension?

Reema Aldahash and Sultan Altalhab tested graphic novels directly with 66 intermediate English learners in Saudi Arabia, split into an experimental group that read graphic novels and a control group that did not. Their 2020 study, published in the International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, reports that reading graphic novels “positively affects reading comprehension as the experimental group achieved superior results to the control group,” a result stated as a group comparison rather than with a specific percentage.

A separate 2022 study in Frontiers in Psychology measured the broader multimodal mechanism comics rely on, text paired with pictures, more precisely, though the study itself used English phrase-learning material rather than comics specifically.

45% — higher posttest score for English learners who studied phrases with multimodal text-plus-picture material (70.48) versus text-only material (48.53), among 66 EFL learners (p < .001)

Source: Huang et al., 2022

Both groups started from a statistically indistinguishable pretest score, so the gap that opened up by the posttest tracks the study material each group used rather than a difference the groups started with. The two studies point at the same underlying effect from different angles: adding a visual channel to text measurably helps English learners retain what they read, and comics are a text format built around exactly that pairing on every page.

Do You Need Background Knowledge to Read Comics in English?

Comics carry their own conventions, and a reader unfamiliar with them can struggle with a comic despite having no trouble with the English inside it. John D. Benjamin’s 2021 study in Second Language Research & Practice surveyed 26 advanced L2 learners and found that more than a quarter had never read comics at all, in any language, before the study.

Panel order, the distinction between a speech balloon and a thought balloon, and which direction to read a page in are learned skills rather than instinct, and a reader who has never encountered them can lose track of a comic’s story for reasons that have nothing to do with vocabulary. Once learners in Benjamin’s study did engage with a comic, the response was strongly positive:

“Most participants also considered reading comics as a useful way to learn a language.”

— John D. Benjamin, 2021

Of the participants who found comics well suited to language learning, 68.1% specifically pointed to pictures as help for understanding new vocabulary in context. None of the 26 participants said comics were not useful for learning a language. The practical takeaway for a new reader is small: spend the first few pages of an unfamiliar comic noticing panel order and balloon shapes before worrying about difficulty level, since that overhead disappears after the first title.

How Do Comics Compare to Text-Only Graded Readers for Learning English?

Comics and text-only graded readers both deliver comprehensible input, but they trade off differently on what makes a book approachable at a given level.

	Text-only graded reader	Comics and graphic novels
Context for unknown words	Surrounding sentences only	Pictures plus surrounding dialogue
Vocabulary per page	Higher, full sentences	Lower, compressed dialogue
Register	Often more formal or narrative	Often closer to spoken, idiomatic English
Preparation needed	None beyond reading level	Panel order and balloon conventions, once
Best fit	Learners comfortable with dense text	Beginners, reluctant readers, and visual learners

Neither format replaces the other, and the two are frequently combined by readers who use one to build reading stamina and the other to keep dialogue and idioms fresh. A learner working through how to learn English effectively through stories with text-only graded readers can add comics on days when motivation to sit with dense text runs low, without losing the extensive reading habit that method depends on. New words that turn up in either format are worth the same follow-up review, covered in how spaced repetition builds English vocabulary retention.

Which Apps Give You Comics for Learning English?

Storybook, from Dobi Apps, holds more than 1,000,000 books, comics, audiobooks, and learning games organized by level, which puts graphic-novel-format English content and traditional prose in the same library rather than requiring a separate app for each format. A learner who wants to alternate between comics and text-only stories, the way the comparison above suggests, can do both from a single leveled collection instead of hunting for comics-specific apps separately.

Pairing a comic’s dialogue with narrated audio adds a second channel on top of the pictures already helping with vocabulary. Dobi Apps’ Audiobook organizes leveled audiobooks and ebooks from A1 to C2, and using it alongside a comic at the same level lets a learner hear how the compressed, idiomatic dialogue comics favor actually sounds spoken aloud, rather than only seeing it on the page, the same pairing that works for reading while listening to audiobooks applied to a comic’s dialogue instead of a page of prose. A learner comparing options beyond a single app can also check the top 5 apps for learning English, or read how an audiobook app and an ebook app each fit a different English learning goal before deciding which format to add first.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are comics too simple to actually build English vocabulary?

No. Comics compress dialogue into short lines, which forces more precise word choice rather than simpler word choice, and idioms and colloquial speech appear more densely in comic dialogue than in a comparable page of prose.

Do beginners need any preparation before reading English comics?

A short one, if the reader has never read comics before: panel order, speech balloons versus thought balloons, and where to look next on a page are conventions rather than instinct. A research study found more than a quarter of participants had never read comics at all before the conventions were explained.

Sources

📖 Read the original article on the Dobi Apps blog: Do Comics and Graphic Novels Help You Learn English?

Learn English with the Dobi Apps: Audiobook · Storybook · All articles · ← Dobi Apps