Basa Basi Mitsy: Teaching Itinerary Writing with a Comic Travel Guide

My Year 9 writers can describe their weekend, but ask them for an itinerary and the text falls apart. Times float, days merge, and every sentence starts with “And then”. This term I fixed it with a comic.

The trick was to separate understanding from writing. I gave the class a travel guide in Bahasa Indonesia, so nobody struggled with the content, and asked them to produce the plan in English. All of their effort went into the language I wanted to teach.

The source text

I used Gacor25 , a comic-style travel guide to Mamallapuram, a temple town on the coast of Tamil Nadu in South India. It lays out 25 tips in the order a traveller meets them: planning, the flight to Chennai, the monuments, getting around, and the hotel. For a teacher this ordering is gold, because the sequence is already there and students only have to put it into English.

It also helps that nobody in my class had heard of the place. Unfamiliar beats boring: they wanted to know why a temple stands on a beach.

Lesson 1: from tips to a plan

Warm-up (5 minutes). Show one panel and ask: “Where are they going, and how long does it take?” Students answer in English with “It takes about…”.

Reading (15 minutes). Pairs read the guide and choose ten tips they would really use. They copy each tip as a short note, in Bahasa is fine.

Sorting (15 minutes). Each pair gets a grid: Day 1 to Day 4, morning / afternoon / evening. They place their ten notes on the grid. This is where the arguments start, which is exactly what you want: “You can’t visit the temple before you land.”

Language input (10 minutes). I put this on the board and leave it there:

Lesson 2: writing the itinerary

Pairs turn the grid into a written itinerary of 200–250 words. One rule: every stop must answer when, where, how long and why. A sentence like “Day 2: temple” fails all four. A sentence like “On Day 2 we will visit the Shore Temple at sunrise, because the light is soft and it is not crowded yet” passes.

Extension: the polite email. Stronger pairs write a short email to a hotel asking for an airport pickup and early check-in. The comic’s last chapter is all about the hotel, so the content is ready-made. Target phrases: “Could you…”, “Would it be possible to…”, “We will land at…”.

Assessment

I mark three things only, out of 10 each:

1. Sequence: can a reader follow the trip without getting lost?
2. Time and duration: are times and lengths clear and correct?
3. Purpose: does each stop have a reason?

Grammar slips that do not block meaning are noted, not marked down. That keeps the focus where the lesson was.

What worked, what I would change

The Bahasa-to-English step worked better than any model text I have used, because students were not copying English sentences, they were building them. The sorting grid is the heart of it, so do not rush it. Next time I will add a map so pairs can see the route from Chennai down the coast, and I will ask each pair to present one day aloud, which turns the writing into speaking practice for free.