The holistic experience of picturebooks in primary ELT: a story-based conversation

Picturebooks provide a language-rich authentic experience in early English language learning. They encourage children to engage with big ideas and develop critical thinking skills while improving their English. Unlike the course book, the picturebook creates a conversation between the word and the picture, the language and the ideas and the curriculum and the world. Hence, the picturebook provides a holistic language learning experience for the children and the teacher. Yet, many teachers are unsure of how to exploit the picturebook as a resource in itself, that is, create a story-based conversation to develop language, motivation and a love of reading in young language learners. This paper is based on one boy’s experience of attending short intensive story-based courses from age five to ten. These courses were offered in an out-of-school context during the school holidays. The picturebook was the starting point and the main topic of the ‘conversation’, and the course followed a story-based methodology: it started the conversation in pre-reading discussions around the cover and predictions about the content. It continued in the multiple dialogic readings of the story as the children engaged with the language, the characters and the themes. It expanded into post-reading cross-curricular topics and the creativity of music, art and drama. This single case study, based on an interview with the child and his multimodal texts (words and drawings), allowed the child to retrospectively reflect on and foreground the main experiences of his multiple conversations with picturebooks via the story-based approach. His multimodal narratives highlight the following experiences: the interactive, dialogical aspects of the conversation with the books; the creative affordances of picturebooks; and the overall message of the stories, with language learning occurring incidentally. The child’s insights provide teachers with a window into the potential benefits of a story-based conversation with picturebooks in ELT.