How can picturebooks and stories transform the way children learn languages and navigate digital spaces in the primary classroom?

The research presented in this chapter demonstrates how picturebooks and stories can open up possibilities for more sustainable, creative and multimodal approaches to learning new languages in the primary classroom. We look at the importance of children’s literature, stories and CLIL in creating welcoming learning environments for languages and how multilingual literacy can be developed using digital technology, including multilingual digital storytelling. Fostering teacher agency is key to this story-based approach and developing deeper motivation to teach primary languages. We describe the context for teaching primary languages in England and show how a new story-based pedagogical approach is vital to enhance the confidence of primary teachers. We adopt a critical ethnographic approach towards language planning and policy and the research focuses on action research carried out in a London primary school. The new whole-school primary languages curriculum analysed in this chapter has been developed from the ongoing collaborative research between the teacher educator/researcher, Sahmland, and lead German teacher/researcher, Hackney, and the school is part of the Critical Connections Project co-directed by Macleroy. We conclude with research findings from a year-long study using a picturebook to teach German that reveal the impact of using stories in the primary languages classroom

An exploration of how children’s language learning can be transformed when teachers place creativity and stories at the centre of the curriculum and experiment with digital storytelling in the classroom

This article examines how the teaching of languages can be transformed across the whole-school primary curriculum when teachers and researchers collaborate to make space for creativity and stories. The research presented here looks carefully at this process of transformation and how primary school teachers can become motivated to teach languages in more open-ended and creative ways. The researchers situate the debate within the fractured emergence of Primary Modern Foreign Languages (PMFL) as a subject in England and the lack of teachers’ proficiency in languages beyond English. In many primary school contexts, the teaching of languages is repetitive and highly formulaic and the researchers wanted to find novel ways to motivate teachers and children to learn languages. The researcher and teacher’s collaborative work on the curriculum became part of the Critical Connections Multilingual Digital Storytelling Project (2012-ongoing) where stories and digital technology are used to re-engage language learners. The children (7-8 year olds) in this case study created a digital story Wir gehen auf Drachenjagd (We’re Going on a Dragon Hunt) for an international digital storytelling festival (June 2019). The research findings demonstrate the power of stories combined with the digital dimension enabled children to use new language productively and creatively