(Re-)contextualizing Storytelling with Children in English L2: Mobile-Assisted Language Teacher Education

This chapter discusses how digital multiliteracies and multimodal practices are shared and recontextualised through a mobile-assisted community for language teachers; the case study is about YELL/TELL (Young / Teen English Language Learners), which is a professional online community open to student teachers, language teachers, language educators and volunteer narrators in English L2. The chapter, underpinned by multiliteracies pedagogy and multimodal studies, focuses on Mobile-Assisted Language Teacher Education (MALTE) as a way to support student teachers and experienced teachers in their initial and lifelong development through mobile-assisted learning. We analyze mobile-assisted practices for teacher education in the project Storytelling with Children in English L2, based on storytelling events for children whose native language is not English. We discuss how professional actions performed by language teacher narrators (searching, planning, rehearsing storytelling events, performing them, reflecting on them, assessing one’s work, sharing recordings and comments, re-contextualising resources) are facilitated, or problematically informed, by mobile-assisted exchanges during the different phases of the project. Among the advantages of MALTE, the study highlights the enhanced agency of the teacher students/narrators, the active co-construction of professional knowledge together with peers and educators, the use of authentic communication for professional purposes in multimodal settings and through a variety of media, and sharing language competence and professional knowledge across educational institutions (in our case the university and the local library). Audio-recordings, self-recorded videos, digital applications for storytelling and podcasting (easily available, shared and commented through mobile devices) contribute to creating a seamless network of discussion, sharing, reflection and learning between teacher educators and student teachers. The chapter also briefly presents how MALTE supported the narrators’ and educators’ actions during the lockdown of university, schools and libraries due to the Covid-19 emergency in Spring 2020.