A Focus on Multiliteracies: Multimodal Narratives and a Blog in English Teacher Education

Student teachers in the twenty-first century require knowledge about multiple literacies and how to teach them. Consequently, it no longer suffices to equip student teachers with the tools to instruct literary reading in an English language teaching context. Pre-service teachers require a notion of how to approach different literacies, preferably by focusing on multimodal narratives. Student teachers in courses on children’s literature at the Zurich University of Teacher Education are taught about multiple literacies and may use a blog to publish their analyses of narrative across media formats. This task design is motivated by the insight that learning should not just focus on performance in the present but be geared towards future uses. Digital platforms permit global visibility and, potentially, a worldwide audience. Ultimately, student teachers profit by sharing their insights and developing them in cooperation with others. The Children’s Literature Blog (Prusse, 2017) supports them by offering a resource for ideas and materials for ELT classrooms. Among the 131 student teachers’ contributions to the blog, those that focus on picturebooks are evaluated by means of reflexive thematic analysis. The presentation of selected results is also based on questionnaires filled in by course participants, qualitative guided interviews of a number of students, and the blog’s impact measured by means of global access records. These provide additional research data that permit an insight into the teaching and learning about narrative, multiliteracies, and the affordances of a public blog.