Narrative Thinking and Storytelling for primary and early FL/SL education

This contribution reasserts the importance of narrative in the development of cognition since narratives offer us ways to reorganize our experiences via a process of categorization. The author considers how storytelling functions to help us understand and know ‘The Other’ as it is conveyed through language. Storytelling in L1, through fairy tales for example, constitutes the first experience with ‘foreignness’. To understand and enjoy the story, the child must step into the life and mind of the characters – indeed become the character - which builds both empathy and an altered sense of perspective. It is posited that a similar condition is created in the second language (L2) classroom, where the learner becomes the centre of the story of his or her own journey of learning replete with experiences and challenges. This comes full circle in the CLIL experience, where the objects of experience and learning are narratives themselves. A multisensory approach to storytelling has been developed by a network of pre-primary and primary schools of the Marche region (LIREMAR). Focusing on the storylines of narrative formats, young learners experience a CLIL environment where the content is represented by the narrative formats themselves while L2 skills are acquired in a natural way as a by-product of storytelling. The study maintains that in a CLIL environment storytelling may represent an effective early L2 teaching strategy. Within this theoretical framework, future teachers can be provided with linguistic and methodological training targeted to help them teach storytelling effectively. The online master course organized at the University of Urbino: Inglese e Didattica CLIL per bambini specifically gears at providing pre-primary school teachers with such professional skills.