Page 66 - Diversity in Action

Martina Irsara, Valentina Gobbett Bamber, and Barbara Caprara

munication that incorporates various strategies to support learning. Such
strategies are interactive as well as multimodal and embodied, congruently
with Pennycook’s (2018) view of language: they include prosodic features
of teachers’ voices (intonation, stress, tempo, volume, and rhythm), ges-
tures/movement, facial expressions, and the use of realia (physical objects
or materials). Teachers’ interactional competences enable teachers to en-
gage all learners in scaffolded conversations. In their turn, picturebooks and
oral stories, through their multimodal and embodied elements (activated
by teachers’ vocal and gestural mediation), also scaffold learners’ under-
standing, motivation and participation. This entails that sometimes taken-
for-granted features such as teachers’ voices, prosody, and presence are es-
sential, as they contribute to promoting learners’ comprehension, inclusion
and engagement in pedagogical-cultural events. Teachers’ creative teacher
talk also appears crucial in multilingual approaches which aim to promote
children’s higher order thinking through the complex interweaving of story-
based approaches and GCED.
While picturebooks have largely been our focus, oral storytelling can pro-
vide a complementary approach and potentially engender hopeful edu-
cational synergies in the GCED multilingual classroom and ELT. Selected
authentic oral storytelling repertoires offer multifaceted and motivating
scaffolding to both teachers and learners through their memorable – typ-
ically tripartite – structures, repetitions, themes, contexts, clearly defined
characters, and the simple dialogues, language patterns, and rhymes often
found in stories (Bland, 2015, 2022; Gobbett Bamber, 2024; Pinter, 2006). In
both read-alouds and oral storytelling, teachers draw on multimodality to
speak/interact in a varied, embodied and expressive manner, with multilay-
ered expressive gestures, movements, and facial expressions, thus aiding
learners’ comprehension and participation.
Teachers can structure story-based activities through interlinked stages to
optimally scaffold the learners’ exploration of GCED themes in multilingual
contexts. Ghosn (2013) suggests that teachers frame a story-based activity as
a repeated cycle or ‘journey’ comprising four stages: the first, pre-story, in-
troduces key themes and language; the second entails reading aloud while
ensuring interaction with learners through embodiment and multimodal-
ity; the third, post-story, further explores themes through teacher questions,
plenary and small-group activities; lastly, story themes and language are
repeatedly explored and expanded. Read’s (2008) nine steps further scaf-
fold learners’ engagement through progressing from introducing learners
to the picturebook/story, to creating embodied and creative opportunities

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