Multilingual Storybooks in the Language Classroom

The integration of stories and storybooks has become a common practice in teaching second or foreign languages in primary school classrooms. On the one hand, story-based instruction corresponds to the most relevant principles of early foreign language teaching, such as learner activation and learner orientation, output orientation, holistic and cross curricular learning. In addition, stories, and especially multimodal picture storybooks, can provide acquisition-rich and comprehensible input, as well as a meaningful context for young learners (e.g. Ellis & Brewster, 2014; Elsner, 2015).

Much research has been done with regard to story-based teaching and learning and learner motivation or interest (e.g. Hidi & Harackiewicz, 2000), the impact of storybook reading on reading development (e.g. Ghosn, 2013: 76) or the effect of storybook usage on vocabulary development in L1 and L2 (e.g. Elley, 1989, 1997: 9). The results of these studies show that stories, and especially storybooks, are a very useful tool for foreign or second language education, presenting language in a memorable and conversant context to the learners (for an overview, see Ghosn, 2013).

However, most of the studies in this field have focused on the use of monolingual books in the target language of the respective classroom. A topic that has rather been neglected in this context is the usage of multilingual storybooks in early second or foreign language learning contexts. The small number of studies to be found in this field are basically limited to the question of how bilingual (picture story-)books can be used to support minority language speaker children in dual literacy development at an early stage of reading (e.g. Ma, 2008; Robertson, 2006). Except for the studies conducted by Bündgens-Kosten and Elsner (2014), Elsner et al. (2014) and Lohe and Elsner (2014), there has been little research so far that focuses on the use of multilingual books in early foreign language education.