Page 63 - Diversity in Action

Global Citizenship Education and English Learning through Picturebooks

align well with the goals of GCED, which seeks to cultivate responsible and
informed individuals.
Children’s thinking, learning, and global citizenship skills can be devel-
oped through the teaching of specific subjects and the promotion of cross-
curricularlinks.Interdisciplinarityisinherent in GCED,but theteachingoflan-
guages plays an important role, as language skills are essential to approach
global issues from different perspectives and to promote international un-
derstanding (Lütge et al., 2023). The English language can be a window to
the world, and a good example of how a language is not necessarily linked
to a particular culture or community, but to the wider world with speakers of
different accents and cultures.
The teaching of English as an international language needs to be con-
stantly rethought in response to evolving trends in language, language
learning, and language use. Communication seems to have become increas-
ingly multimodal. Language is only one modality of making meaning, and
learners need to learn to read or interpret texts of different kinds, includ-
ing spoken, written, and visual. Pennycook (2018) emphasises that language
learning does not just happen in our heads, arguing that it ‘happens in and
around a much wider set of semiotic assemblages including touch, smell,
taste, things and places’ (Pennycook, 2018, p. 131), and that we need to ‘con-
sider the social, spatial and embodied dimensions of language learning’
(Pennycook, 2018, p. 131). Finally, ELT needs to be considered in the light of
global developments. It can be argued that English as an international lan-
guage cannot be taught without reference to global issues and that YLs of
English need to be encouraged to see the bigger picture.
In practice, teachers can promote higher-order thinking and global citi-
zenship through the use of effective questions and multimodal materials.
The way teachers ask questions can have both immediate and lasting effects
on children’s learning. By asking questions that encourage reflection, analy-
sis and enquiry, teachers encourage children to think critically – to take the
time to look at situations from various perspectives. Finally, a story-based ap-
proach in ELT for YLs can go beyond improving children’s understanding of
English grammar and vocabulary and extend into cross-curricular areas, in-
cluding multimodal communication and GCED. It has been shown that GCED
is not confined to ELT at secondary level but can also be usefully integrated
into foreign language learning at primary level, for example through the use
of storytelling (Mastellotto, 2023; Koppel, 2025).
Stories and picturebooks can encourage children to reflect on their per-
sonal role within the community and relate their individual experiences to

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