International Conference: language education for sustainable development

Natsue Nakayama is a professor at the Faculty of Education Bunkyo University in Japan. She received an MSc from the University of Oxford. She has been involved in teaching EFL and pre-service teacher training. Her research interests include language teacher education and intercultural approaches to language teaching.

As globalization progresses, it is increasingly important for language learners to develop appropriate knowledge, attitudes and skills required for world citizens. To develop qualities, such as empathy or “linguistic, communicative and plurilingual skills” mentioned in the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (Council of Europe, 2018), a project was planned in which university students taking English teacher training course, or pre-service teachers, read English picture books online to elementary school students. Picture book was used because it offers potential for children to gain an experiential understanding of the world. My Sweet Stories, an English picture book adopted in the project was created with the intention of fostering intercultural citizenship. The main character is a sweet-loving cat who introduces his friends from different cultures together with their memories attached to their favorite sweets. It introduces the diversity of each character’s cultures as well as the commonality in that each has their own special “sweet memories”. The participants were fourth graders (aged 9-10) in their second year of English learning, who listened to stories about unfamiliar cultures in a language they had just started to learn. Thus, the pre-service teachers needed to provide appropriate linguistic and cultural scaffolds, or “picture book mediation (Ellis & Mouran, 2021) while reading the picture book. Through planning and implementing the read-aloud, pre-service teachers explored the language and culture in the picture book, and mediated the content to make the children experience the story. The author analyzed techniques pre-service teachers used to support children's understanding and their perceptions toward the project. The results revealed that they made conscious efforts to make children empathize with and relate to the characters and episodes. In contrast, children's comment sheets revealed their increased interest in English language, picture books, other cultures, and eagerness to engage with the pre-service teachers.

Council of Europe. (2018). Reference framework of competences for democratic culture. Council of Europe.
Ellis, G., & Mourão, S. (2021). Demystifying the read-aloud. The Modern English Teacher, 136, 22-25. https://pepelt21.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/ellis-mourao-2021-etp.pdf.
Nakayama, N., & Tsuchiya, K. (2021). The effect of English storytelling activities to children on the attitudes of student teacher. JAAL in JACET Proceedings, 3, 78-84.