… At least, that’s the idea. Elizabeth Woyke over at BusinessWeek reports that the Washington Post’s test prep company Kaplan has released a series of comic books designed to help buttress the vocabulary of young test-takers. The manga, or Japanese-style comic books so popular these days, are chock full of key words found on the SAT, PSAT, and ACT tests. Each word is used in context within the comic books, highlighted, and defined. Thus, future test takers can read a thrilling comic book and hopefully increase their vocabulary for the test.
Woyke reports that popular themes among youngsters provided the story and settings for the comic books:
Los Angeles publisher TOKYOPOP provided all the manga: a sci-fi fantasy, a medieval epic based on the hit video game Warcraft, and a swords-and-sorcery tale. To beef up the books’ SAT quotient, the companies upgraded some of the dialogue. But all the original art and story lines are preserved, says TOKYOPOP CEO Stu Levy.
The comic books may also appeal to English language learners.
