Creating Rage Comics with EFL Students

In reply to a number of requests, this post outlines our methodology behind getting our students to create and upload rage comics to reddit.

First Lesson

The first lesson is a general introduction to the vocabulary for emotions in English. At the end of the lesson, students are introduced to popular Internet memes known as rage faces and are asked to guess what emotion they are portraying.

Below are the slides we used as part of the lesson.

Emotions 1: Introduction to rage faces

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This is the accompanying worksheet: http://bit.ly/emotionsworksheet

 

Second Lesson

In this lesson we went over the phenomenon of "trolling" and helped the students register on reddit, create their comics with ragemaker.net and then upload their completed comics to reddit.

Below are the slides we used as part of the lesson:

 

Emotions 2: Creating comics

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Hints, Tips and Considerations

• Because students were all submitting their comics from the same room (hence the same IP address) I had an issue with submitting comics where reddit would say, "you are doing that too much, try again in 10 minutes." Which meant that students could only submit their comics once every 10 minutes. A massive delay! To remedy this problem, you should input all students usernames on your subreddit as approved submitters. The link is here: http://www.reddit.com/r/SUBREDDIT/about/contributors/

• Students should be advised that the content on reddit (especially rage comics) often contain inappropriate material or themes for school settings. We therefore recommend carrying out such lessons with mature students. In our particular context, all students were 18+.

• Adding flair after students names helps the reddit community know who is or is not a student.

• Because anyone can post anything on reddit, we recommend monitoring the comments that students receive on their comics, looking out for anything inappropriate or insulting. (We found that the community reported such comments in a lot of cases, too.)

• As a follow up lesson, we recommend having students reply to any comments they received, comparing their upvote scores, commenting on new comics and participating in English with the community you have created (= interacting with other English speakers).