Storytelling with Children in Informal Contexts. Learning to Narrate Across the Offline/Online Boundaries

In this study, we discuss how volunteer, non-professional narrators (student teachers of primary education university courses) collaborate (offline and online) to engage young children during storytelling sessions to help them adopt an active approach towards a story in English L2. The case study focuses on the project Storytelling in English L2 for young learners (Udine University, Italy) on the power of storytelling as a multimodal experience for children and volunteer narrators alike. Storytelling is seen as a collaborative practice that offers children and storytellers the means to create and recreate contexts through interaction among participants who (consciously or spontaneously) “orchestrate” ensembles of co-deployed modes and are active agents in co-constructing meaning. The underlying framework of reference is a socio-semiotic view of education which recognizes learners’ agency and teachers’ role in facilitating and promoting educational interaction. The chapter analyzes three videos of storytelling sessions focusing on key multimodal aspects of storytelling dimensions and on the collaborative reflection between narrators and educators: verbal aspects (storybook language and/or narrator’s language choices), voice quality (volume, speed of delivery, pitch, type of intonation), soundtrack (music, sound effects), gestures, gaze, and use of space.