Developing Young Learners’ Multiliteracies through Multimodal Storytelling

Abstract

Satisfying a rich communicative function in both linguistic and cultural terms, children’s literature and storytelling present an effective approach to the development of multiple literacies in primary education. As a rich source of high-quality language input, children’s stories lend themselves to language and literacy work, not only in L1 but L2 as well. Learnersgain language exposure in an authentic and meaningful context that stimulates their listening and reading fluencywhilehelpingthemlearntherhythm,intonation,prosodyandpronun-ciation of the target language. Picture books offer a dual-decoding experience since the text carries meaning that is enhanced by images and peritextual features, which offer visual scaffolding to help young learners unlock narrative meaning in the target language. This chapter will explore children’s stories as a powerful pedagogical tool for developing young learners’ functional literacy and emotional literacy. Two popular storybooks, namely Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo (1999a; 1999b; 1999c) and Trudy Ludwig’s The Invisible Boy (2013), will be examined to demonstrate how multimodal storytelling practices offer rich opportunities for communication and meaning-making activities with young learners through multisensory input that activates their learning on multiple levels.