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This study explores the perceptions of primary EFL (English as a foreign language) trainee teachers on the potential of poetry as an instrument to enhance their knowledge of English. The aim was to determine whether or not learners' opinions coincided with theoretical principles established by scholars in favour of using literature in EFL classrooms. An 18-item questionnaire was distributed to 270 trainees to obtain quantitative and qualitative data on alleged linguistic, motivational and intercultural benefits. The results confirm that trainees believe poetry-based English lessons to be more useful for developing language skills, pronunciation, grammatical and lexical knowledge than for intercultural or motivational gains. The present study contributes to the academic expansion of the field in two main ways: i) by providing evidence which empirically tests the predominantly theoretical drive of work available to date; and ii) by offering a systematic and holistic exploration of the potential advantages of poetry which goes beyond the methodologically inconsistent and fragmentary views offered by existing research.

In recent years, the interest in early language learning shown by both parents and politicians has led to the introduction of a second language (L2), particularly English, to children as young as two or three years old in pre-schools and kindergartens across Europe and beyond. The demands involved in teaching this age-range require from teachers a set of specialized skills to ensure that children's first experience with a new language is as enjoyable and fruitful as possible. This article discusses the impact of learner-internal and contextual factors on children's second language learning, together with the contribution that children make to the process in terms of their language-learning abilities. In doing so, key issues such as promoting comprehension, lexical acquisition and initial language production in the second language are addressed, together with the methodological implications derived from this knowledge. Finally, an age-appropriate approach for teaching children using predictable dramatized stories is presented.

This study explores the challenges and benefits primary education EFL trainees (N = 28) reported when designing and videoing a storytelling session originally intended to be conducted offline with young learners. This change of scenario was caused by the COVID-19 crisis. The data for the study were derived from the trainees’ written reflections, focus group interviews, videos of instructional sessions and student-authored multimodal videos, which were explored to interpret trainees’ creative processes while engaged in multimodal composing. The results indicate that trainees hold videoed storytelling to have a similar number of challenges and benefits as face-to-face storytelling. However, two of the reported advantages, enhanced creativity and self-confidence, sit at misconceptions based on trainees’ limited knowledge of the pedagogical potential of multimodal resources. The findings have important educational implications in helping develop a pedagogy of videoed storytelling, while also highlighting the need for teacher training programs to specifically target the development of teachers’ competence in multimodal pedagogy.

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