Based on the four processes of the pedagogy of multiliteracies and the combination of linguistic, literary and visual features, this paper presents a multimodal approach that aims to equip pre-service teachers with a model to guide young students to produce meaning and elaborate knowledge through artistic resources such as picturebooks.
As the fields of applied linguistics and teacher education continue developing in the 21st Century, our current global screen-oriented contemporary world (Greenfield 2015) demands the implementation of new pedagogical methodologies and didactic resources that are in tune with multimodality (Kress 2010; Serafini 2014), multiliteracies (NLG 1996; Kern 2000; Paesani et al. 2016) and creative inquiry practices (Mackenzie & Bathurst-Hunt 2018). Based on the four processes of the pedagogy of multiliteracies (Kalantzis et al. 2016) and the combination of linguistic, literary and visual features, this paper presents a multimodal approach that aims to equip pre-service teachers with a model to guide young students to produce meaning and elaborate knowledge in the Arts&Crafts classroom through the reading of The Snow Lion (Helmore & Jones 2017). In this respect, picturebooks prove to be an effective multimodal artifact through which teachers of EFL or any other arts-based disciplines can foster students’ literacy and a natural bond with creativity, stories and literature (Bader 1976). With this purpose in mind, the research questions that arise are: How effective is the integration of creative arts in the teaching of English as a foreign language? How can EFL teachers contribute to develop children’s multiliteracies in Primary Education by using the multimodal toolkit we have designed? Findings reported in this paper are part of a larger study that aims to analyze the instructional materials created based on the multiliteracies framework and identifies the knowledge processes addressed by tasks within lesson plans that revolve around a selection of picturebooks.
