English language teaching in the digital age: narrative across the media, multiliteracies, and blogs

1 Introduction and institutional context

The following contribution first establishes the institutional context of a small-scale action-research project in Zurich. It then highlights the significance of narrative in an English language teaching (ELT) environment and explains the necessity of teaching multiliteracies in the twenty-first century. The first research question investigates the potential impact of student teachers’ output published on a blog. The second research question attempts to establish the extent to which an implicit transfer of input on visual, digital and multimodal literacies during courses on children’s and young adult literature can be detected when participants write their course assignments. One option for these assignments is a contribution to a public blog on children’s literature in ELT, while the alternative is an oral presentation, which is not included in the findings presented here. The study employed reflexive thematic analysis of the data corpus on which the study was based, including questionnaires completed by the student teachers, semi-structured interviews with designated course participants and the blog entries. This is followed by a discussion of selected aspects of the preliminary results of the project in relation to the course aims, which focus on preparing student teachers for (multi-)literacy instruction in contemporary and future ELT classrooms.

Children’s and young adult literature in ELT has been a seminal aspect of the author’s teaching and research at the Zurich University of Teacher Education (PHZH) since 2003. The initial implementation of seminars that concentrate on narrative media for children and young adults provided electives for student teachers studying to become primary and lower secondary teachers. However, these classes were discontinued in 2011 after two curricular reforms radically reduced the number of optional courses. Since 2017, two new electives on children’s literature have been part of the course programme offered by the International Office at the PHZH, primarily attracting students from partner institutions around the world. These incoming students represent between 80 and 100 % of the total number of participants in the classes, while the remaining free places are given to local Swiss students. Thus, group size varies considerably, depending on how many visiting students choose Zurich and how many local students opt for this elective. As Table 1 reveals, in 2018 the smallest group comprised just four students, while the largest one in autumn 2022 consisted of 26 students. In general, the spring term is less likely to be chosen for an exchange semester and, hence, those classes tend to be smaller, with the number of incoming students usually being larger in autumn.

Both the incoming students from partner universities (for a complete list of these institutions, see PHZH 2024) and the few local students who participate in these classes are enrolled in diverse study programmes. Accordingly, the student teachers in these classes consist of heterogenous groups of future kindergarten, primary and lower secondary teachers, both in the foundation course “Introduction to Children’s Literature”, offered in autumn, and the focus course “Aspects of Children’s Literature”, which is the programme in spring.

The syllabi in these courses include both classics from the canon of children’s literature (such as Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and The Secret Garden) and more modern and contemporary texts from various societies in the English-speaking world, not just from the British Isles and the United States, but also from, among others, Australia, Canada, India and South Africa. The foundation course first presents the history of children’s literature and then proceeds to introduce several topical meetings, which focus on different genres and themes such as historical fiction, school stories and migrant narratives. Similarly, the focus course in spring briefly touches on canonical texts and fairy tales before attending to analyses of children’s and young adult media that deal with time-travel, dystopia and detective fiction.

Since developments in the twenty-first century have led to the perception that visual features need to be considered “as important as the written language” (Serafini 2023: 248), a significant amount of time in both terms is dedicated to the study of picturebooks. These range from canonical texts such as Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) to more recent publications like Anushka Ravishankar’s Tiger on a Tree (1997), Anthony Browne’s Voices in the Park (1998), Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s The Gruffalo (1999), Emily Gravett’s Wolves (2006) and There’s a Ghost in This House (2021) by Oliver Jeffers. Apart from presenting and analysing certain books, the two courses repeatedly refer to adaptations to other media as well as to narratives that only exist in another format such as television, cinema or drama. This means that not every text is discussed in terms of multiliteracies.

2 Narrative in the ELT classroom

The term “narrative turn” in the ensuing discussion is not used in the sense that readers with a background in social science research are inclined to expect. The phrase was originally coined in the context of research practices in science and, at a later stage, transferred to research practices in social sciences (Rouse 1990). With reference to ELT, the “narrative turn” initially designates the study of teachers’ narratives about their classroom experiences (e.g. Barkhuizen 2011, 2018). By contrast to these manifestations of “narrative turns” that provide labels for specific research methods, this contribution postulates that in the context of English language education it ought to be applied to the teaching of literacies and the return of stories to the ELT classroom. This revival of literature in an extended sense is due to the digital transformation: Nowadays narratives do not simply reside quietly on bookshelves but proliferate across various media formats, thrive in multimodal contexts and can effectively contribute to the language acquisition process both in- and outside the classroom (Bland 2018, 2022; Prusse 2023). As a result of this context, teacher training in the twenty-first century requires an awareness of this medial environment and needs to consider the manner in which the omnipresence of narratives may have an impact on ELT, particularly in view of teaching multiliteracies (New London Group 1996).

Narrative is a distinct human trait and is the reason the species is sometimes labelled “the storytelling animal” (Gottschall 2012) or homo narrans (Brockmeier 2014). The telling of stories and its potential impact on learners has generated increased interest among researchers and teachers because the data, particularly from brain research, suggests that narrative configurations may support learning effectively. Research studies (see for example Armstrong 2020; Kucirkova and Cremin 2020) provide evidence that stories are characterised by features that mirror the functioning of the human brain and its need to find structure by means of patterns, for example when organising an individual’s autobiographical experience.

Bearing this in mind it is evident that narration plays a crucial role when educating young people (Mallan 2017; Weller 2023) and, inherently, when educating teachers, because “stories support humankind’s drive to construct coherence and meaning and they take the reader on educational journeys” (Bland 2018: 3). This results in a “narrative turn” in classrooms, which aims at reintroducing literature into ELT. It might also be motivated by the growing realisation that a focus on language alone is not satisfactory for most learners, who would prefer to engage with proper content, and stories provide this. It is quite different from the traditional approach to teaching literature with a capital L (McRae 1991) that used to distinguish the grammar translation method in ELT. When literature was relegated to the background in the wake of the communicative approach from the seventies of the last century onwards, a dichotomy between language training and literary studies resulted (Kramsch and Nolden 1994). The ensuing, almost exclusively linguistic, focus on the processes of language acquisition, however, is unlikely to benefit the needs of learners who want to develop cognitively in addition to learning the language (Paran 2008).

3 An approach to teaching multiliteracies

Multiliteracies (New London Group 1996) are defined by a comprehensive perception of literacy that moves beyond the traditional acquisition of reading and writing skills to encompass a range of modes of communication, specifically within today’s diverse cultural and digital contexts. This means that there is also a shift towards multimodality and “how semiotic resources (visual, gestural, spatial, linguistic and others) work and are organised” (Lim et al. 2022). It accentuates that literacy is not a singular skill but refers to a set of competencies across different media that comprise digital, visual, audio and interactive formats. Furthermore, multiliteracies address the importance of cultural and linguistic diversity when creating meaning (Exley 2007; Lim et al. 2022); such a perception supports learners in engaging critically with multiple forms of media.

Multiliteracies have become the new paradigm in language teaching even if some of the first proponents would disagree: “It isn’t a paradigm or method or theory” (Garcia et al. 2018). The original protagonists essentially aimed at what is understood to be the most important educational goal in the twenty-first century, namely equipping learners with the essential tools and skills to succeed in the future and, as the authors add, also to change their environment (Lütge 2018; New London Group 1996). One example of such a skill would be visual literacy, which is required to decode the complex graphic messages that are constantly transmitted across the various media in the digital age (Goldstein 2016). Regarding student teachers, this means extending their classroom repertoires from just teaching the analysis of printed text to being able to deliver instruction that supports learners in the acquisition of further literacies, for instance by nurturing skills in analysing pictures and moving images (visual literacy/film literacy; see Lim et al. 2022; Weller 2023).

In a twenty-first century classroom, “text” refers not simply to classical printed matter but also to physical and digital formats and even “live” media (Burwitz-Melzer 2016). Serafini (2023) and Anstey and Bull (2006 and 2018) designate picturebooks as an excellent starting point to make student teachers aware of multiliteracies. This statement is supported by the author’s experience with student teachers in his courses. Anstey and Bull’s argument to begin with this established pedagogical format is reinforced by findings on brain functions and learning, which prove that it is by means of stories that the brain learns best: “Narrative seems to hold the key to how language and the mind work” (Armstrong 2020: 13).

One reason why fictional narratives are suited for an ELT classroom is their complexity: they are ambiguous and raise questions that cannot be answered simply or clearly (Hall 2018; McRae 2008). Hence, the focus of a lesson is not simply on language learning but also on thinking skills and thus supports cognitive development. Furthermore, considering narratives in various media formats by engaging pupils and student teachers in a close and deep reading of transmedia (print, pictures and moving images) will promote the acquisition of analytical skills. Using fiction from around the world, teachers have an opportunity to establish diversity and bring the world into the classroom, as well as to take the classroom out into the world (Mallan 2017). The tutoring in multiliteracies is best done step by step: in the courses in Zurich, student teachers tend to work on selected excerpts and scenes to study two or a maximum of three different literacies at the same time, for instance print literacy, visual literacy and film literacy.

Establishing multiliteracies is an ambitious undertaking for teachers, student teachers and teacher educators. Hence, an introduction to multiliteracies requires beginning with manageable activities, for example by looking at picturebooks as “multimodal ensembles” (Serafini 2023: 247) and by raising the learners’ awareness of what the text does and what the picture does and how the two media formats interact “in an ever-expanding concatenation of understanding” (Nikolajeva and Scott 2001: 2). Despite the increasing accessibility of electronic devices in early childhood education, picturebooks still “remain a ubiquitous element in homes, classrooms, libraries, and bookstores and have been an essential element in children’s early development as readers” (Serafini 2023: 252). Anthony Browne’s Voices in the Park, a “postmodern picturebook” (Anstey and Bull 2018: 195), has proven to be an appropriate resource for this purpose because, both with its themes (individual child and adult perspectives on a specific situation) and its illustrations, it not only addresses children but also adults (see Engels 2020; Prusse 2020, 2022a, 2025). This picturebook presents numerous examples of how a picture can express so much more than words, how the conjunction of “the written text and the spatial logic of visual images” (Serafini 2023: 248) succeeds in making it multifaceted, stimulating and gratifying at the same time. And yet, written text is equally important because in Browne’s picturebook it conveys the mood of the four protagonists verbally and mirrors the moods (e.g. depression, preoccupation) suggested by the illustrations (e.g. the wintry atmosphere in the park; Prusse 2025). Picturebooks generally constitute a perfect starting point to engage with children’s literature in an institution of teacher education: firstly, they can be used by the participants in their future classrooms and, secondly, student teachers can learn about one of the oldest media formats that has always relied on multiliteracies. It is the blend of text and images that creates their distinct impact.

4 Description of the research data

The corpus of research data that is presented in this article is based on the students participating in the classes mentioned above. Thus, the study falls to a large extent into the category of action research (Altrichter et al. 2008; Koshy 2010) since it refers to a specific setting, with changing groups of students, but always the same lecturer, who – except for the website statistics – also collected the various data sets. All the students in the courses were given a short questionnaire towards the end that served a dual function, namely as feedback for the instructor and as an inquiry into what the students believe they had learnt about children’s literature and multiliteracies.

The question that was analysed for this article inquired about the resources the students would use once they qualified as teachers: “If you think about the different media that we used in this module (books, films, TV series, graphic novels, picturebooks), which ones would you use in your future classroom? Which ones would you rather not use (and why)?” (Prusse 2022b). This data set consists of a total of 74 student responses (spring term 2022 up to and including spring term 2024; not all the students provided an answer – the overall response rate was 76 %).

In addition, since the spring term of 2022, the lecturer has also conducted semi-structured interviews with one or two students each semester who volunteer for this task, after which their answers are transcribed. These interview transcripts (5 in total), the relevant responses in the questionnaires and the blog entries (113) the students submitted are investigated by means of reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006; 2020). The names of the student teachers whose statements from interviews or questionnaires are cited in this contribution are pseudonyms. By contrast, when there are quotes from the blog entries they are always attributed to the student teacher who composed the respective contribution, because their authorship on the blog is public and their entries can be accessed freely. In addition to these, the statistical data provided by wordpress.com, the hosting website for the blog, is used to attest to the global reach of the blog. This data set also allows for the recording of which entries have attracted the largest numbers of visitors, where these visitors come from and how the number of visitors has changed over time.

The option to work with a blog was inspired by a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) offered by Duke University on Coursera on the future of higher education (Davidson 2014). In that course, Davidson argues that the insights and the ideas discussed and produced in a university classroom ought to be disseminated, very much in the spirit of Wikipedia, as a communal work that is created with the intention of providing a resource for the future and, simultaneously, to school the students in the practice of sharing knowledge. Moreover, she claims that learning “to think in multiple ways, with multiple partners, with a dexterity that cannot be computerized or outsourced, is no longer a luxury but a necessity” (Davidson 2011: 77). From the autumn term of 2017 onwards, the student teachers in the children’s literature courses were offered two options to gain credits for the course: either they could make an oral presentation in one of the meetings during the term or they could write a blog entry (Prusse 2017). As a result of this framework, anecdotal evidence shows that the quality of the texts written by the students tended to be much better than in the past when they handed in an essay destined only for the eyes of their lecturer. The main reason for these more carefully composed analyses came from the awareness that their efforts would be globally visible (this phenomenon is also described in Vogt and Schmelter 2022). The task of writing a blog entry makes student teachers become more aware of narrative across the media, which is relevant in the contemporary context, since most of their future pupils’ out-of-school reading, listening and watching will be predominantly multimodal, as Bland (2018) points out. An additional benefit for the international students is that they can access their entry from anywhere in the world and can also present it to their lecturers or fellow student teachers in their country of origin. They may also share them in their future workplaces, that is, schools.

Before investigating blog entries, interviews and questionnaires, the statistical data is presented. Basically, the blog contains two types of contribution: on the one hand texts that were written by the author of this article, mostly book reviews but also an interview with a visiting author, reflections and shorter articles that would not normally be suited to a scholarly journal. On the other hand, the blog comprises the course assignments written by individual student teachers which focus on teaching a certain media format at a specific target level. Table 2 lists the fifteen blog entries that have attracted most visitors (obviously, the older the entry the more opportunities there were to generate traffic). The landing page that features the most recent entry and the table of contents take the two top positions, and these have been excluded from the table below. Until earlier in 2024, this list was headed by a student teacher’s contribution, whose entry is now ranked second. She analysed two books for children aged three to five and their ensuing adaptations into short movies (Muies 2017).

The statistics for the blog, first established in February 2017, reveal that it was at the end of the 2017 autumn term that a first contribution by a visiting student from China was published and, up to 30 April 2024, 113 students have supplied an entry. The total number of entries (142) is higher than the number of student teacher contributions, as the remaining 29 entries were written by the lecturer, especially in the early days of establishing the blog, with the aim of providing examples and models for the students’ products. The student teachers are asked to select a specific item designed for children or young adults in a media format of their choice and to report on its contents, its potential for the ELT classroom (ideally by means of suggesting tasks and activities) and on further aspects such as information on the author, illustrator or director and on adaptations to other media formats.

While the interest in the blog has continued to grow over the years, it cannot be determined who the people are who use the blog as a resource and how much time they spend perusing the entries. Presumably, most of the enquiries come from student teachers and teachers who attend or have attended the classes in Zurich, know the resource and are looking for inspiration (Switzerland dominates the list of queries by far; see also Figure 1 below).

Figure 1:

The global reach of the blog; Switzerland, where the students actively work with the entries during the modules, clearly dominates the ranking.

The global reach of the blog is one of the great benefits for the student teachers and can be illustrated with the statistics on the map below (Figure 1), where Switzerland, the small dot that provides the darkest spot dominates, probably because the students access the blog regularly during and after the course (most of the assignments are handed in towards the end of the respective semester). All the countries in various shades of blue have generated visitors to the blog and the following table (Table 3) documents the ranking of the nations in sequence according to the number of visits.

While the PHZH welcomes exchange students from various European countries, especially those in the higher ranks of Table 3, as well as from Asia – predominantly from Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and Japan – no exchange students from the United States have participated in these classes. Nevertheless, the blog has attracted many visitors from the US. The author can only speculate that this could be due to one or more of the following three reasons:

1. There is a strong community of children’s literature scholars in the United States that finds the blog a useful resource.

2. American pupils and students at schools and universities refer to the blog when they write assignments or prepare book presentations.

3. Some of the most popular entries deal with American books, for instance the entry on Jacqueline Woodson’s If You Come Softly (1998), and these attract American readers.

The collage in Figure 2 presents four of the blog entries to exemplify the international network that emerges from the contributions, highlighting the linguistic and cultural diversity that is a key aspect of multiliteracies (Exley 2007; Lim et al. 2022). The student teachers not only write about narratives that span a range of media formats from various corners of the English-speaking world – specifically a picturebook, a young adult novel, a classic children’s text and a song that was also published as a picturebook – but their names and their diverse backgrounds also provide insight into the extent of the participants’ international and multicultural backgrounds. This heterogeneity offers numerous learning opportunities during the courses, benefiting both the lecturer and the participating young people. For instance, when Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, Japanese or Spanish student teachers present examples of children’s media formats that are popular in their home countries or that they personally engage with, it enriches everyone’s learning experience. Furthermore, the blog benefits from the wide array of contributions on children’s and young adult media from around the globe.

Figure 2:

A collage of four cover pages taken from individual student teacher contributions (2021–2023). Source: childrensliteratureblogsite.wordpress.com.

5 Preliminary results

The research data collected for this study is extensive and includes more information than the selection considered for initial analysis. The main theme identified as relevant for the second research question in the blog entries – specifically, an awareness of multiliteracies (Did the students refer to more than one media format? Did they demonstrate a familiarity with other literacies such as film or media literacy?) – was determined by the researcher (see Braun and Clarke 2006, 2020) and investigated by means of a semantic approach. The basic aim of the two children’s literature courses is to introduce both Swiss and international student teachers to the idea that narrative occurs across the media and that different formats teach multiliteracies effectively by focusing on a specific selection of literacies.

When examining the various student blog entries (the main data set) in relation to the media discussed, the findings reveal that traditional printed books still dominate. This trend can certainly be attributed to the grammar school education that both the Swiss and the international students typically undergo before enrolling in teacher education, where a focus on traditional print media remains prevalent in the curriculum. Nevertheless, the following survey of the blog entries – a condensed account of the data set – demonstrates that the student teachers’ scope has been extended from printed text to include a wider range of media, even if, from a strictly numerical perspective, print still dominates, holding the top position.

1. 53 entries on books, 30 of which focus exclusively on the print edition, while 23 refer to adaptations in various other media formats

2. 27 entries on picturebooks, one of which is based on a song

3. 13 entries on movies

4. six entries on folk tales and mythology (these include contributions with a Chinese, an Irish and a Japanese background)

5. three entries on fairy tales or fables

6. three entries on graphic novels

7. two entries on anime series (one is an adaptation from a manga series)

8. two entries on (auto-) biographies

9. two entries on non-fiction books

10. single entries (with just one occurrence up to 30 April 2024) include discussions of an e-book, a collection of poems, a brief essay outlining the importance of reading to children, and an app and its potential affordances for supporting reading activities in the classroom.

A superficial glance at this array of blog entries designed by the student teachers could lead to the conclusion that the situation is satisfactory, that a wide range of literacies are addressed, and that the student teachers are adequately prepared to teach multiliteracies in their future classrooms. However, this is not entirely the case if the data set (the blog entries) is scrutinised more closely. Multiliteracies and questions of transmedia storytelling do not surface in most instances; many student teachers still tend to have only one media format in mind. While groups of student teachers readily participate in activities designed to foster an awareness of multiliteracies during course meetings, they are far less likely to transfer this experience when they are given the opportunity to design such activities in their blog entries. The obvious deduction from this observation is that it will take more time and patience to achieve this goal. As the survey of the results above indicates, some awareness of what practical and analytical skills the two courses attempt to transmit can be discerned in the widening of the scope by including non-traditional media formats for classroom activities.

The blog entries further reveal that some student teachers respond to the challenge of dealing with multiliteracies and perceive the blog as a resource. This attitude is reflected in the evaluation of their feedback on the blog in the questionnaires, as in the following examples: “It is such an [sic] helpful and useful tool to have for us future teachers as it provides us with very insightful ideas from other (future) teachers across the world” (Annamaria F22). Lola, who was already a part-time teacher when she attended the class, used the blog for inspiration: “The blog entries help stocking up the reading corner for the children” (F22). Nevertheless, this affirmative attitude has only a limited impact on the contents of their contributions to the blog. When the entries on picturebooks are considered, for instance, many student teachers display an array of creativity by coming up with engaging methodological procedures, some of which appear to be modelled on the theories of aesthetic reading (Bredella 1996, Delanoy 2015; Rosenblatt 1994). These ideas for lessons, for instance with picturebooks, manifest themselves in suggestions where the authors encourage learners to draw, to write a letter to the author and to act out certain scenes (e.g. Sánchez 2024). Learners are invited to deal with the contents creatively or to explore the text and the illustrations from a personal perspective (e.g. Paternostro 2023). This is based on the notion of an individual reaction to the picturebook but shared in the community of the classroom. These activities conform to the parameters of aesthetic reading and attest to the fact that the student teachers have successfully ingested the educational framework for teaching picturebooks as narratives, but they hardly ever focus analytically on visual literacy in their contributions. At most, they establish the value and relevance of visual aspects, for instance by pointing out that in Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the “illustrations further enhance the reading experience because they have an immersive effect” (Zeisberg 2023) or by emphasising that text and image have an equal impact in a specific picturebook: “This illustrated narrative is exceptional because it makes you fall in love with it because of its visual appeal but it is also touching by means of its text” (Delgado 2020).

The presentation of picturebooks in participants’ blog contributions was selected because the student teachers receive several model analyses during the semester that reflect on print literacy, visual literacy and the interplay between the two. The same is true for comparisons between printed texts and narratives in moving images. However, the blog entries rarely include activities that make use of the opportunity presented by adaptations of books into movies, apart from mentioning this connection in passing. One of the few student teachers who does engage with this idea has given careful consideration to how to incorporate narratives in two media formats into a lesson (see also Prusse 2025). Referring to the animated movie of Anatole’s Little Saucepan (Montchaud 2014), Muies (2017) suggests that her very young learners in an ELT classroom should watch the film first and only afterwards read the short illustrated book on which it is based (Carrier 2009). When watching the movie, the learners’ focus is first directed to the intonation and pronunciation before they attempt to read the text for themselves, imitating what they have previously listened to (Muies 2017).

The following data extracts from questionnaires and interviews provide some explanations as to why many student teachers might continue to struggle with media other than print: Nancy states that she has not previously been taught “about different medias [sic], in particular films and graphic novels, which I would not have been familiar with using before taking this class” (H22). Another student teacher expresses her astonishment at the possibility of making use of a television series in her lessons (Monica F23). Annika reveals that the course emboldened her to use all the media formats covered during the semester “now that I discover they can be really useful and help us address many topics” (H23). While the general feedback articulates the student teachers’ appreciation of the plethora of narrative media at their disposal – “I would like to try to combine some different medias [sic] and use them together, for example the book and a film adaptation” (Jana H23) – only a small number responds by transferring such insights into the blog entries and, hence, potentially into their lesson planning when they begin their careers as teachers.

6 Concluding thoughts

Proponents of multiliteracies and multimodality seek to reform classroom practices by calling for a new grammar of multiform transposition that encompasses social semiotics (see for instance Kalantzis and Cope 2022; Serafini 2023). This approach aims to alert pupils to “the media of dissemination and the modes of communication that people use and develop to represent their understanding of the world and to shape power relations with others” (Bezemer and Jewitt 2009).

The preliminary findings of this small-scale research project shed light on the reality of teacher education in Switzerland (and likely in many other countries, given the voices of the international students in these classes and on the blog): With reference to the second research question, the majority of student teachers have not been equipped by their previous schooling to readily adopt multiliteracies during their studies. While the student teachers in the children’s literature courses at the PHZH may not constitute a representative sample, the provisional results of this action research project suggest that most participants, having received a traditional text-based education, can only gradually be led to comprehend multiliterate practices and effectively employ multimodal resources in their future classrooms. It is only when these teachers begin to teach narrative across various media formats and establish practices for developing visual literacy and film literacy that multiliteracies will take root in classrooms, thus influencing new generations of student teachers enrolling at universities of teacher education.

Ultimately, with reference to both research questions, the blog clearly offers valuable opportunities for student teachers in Zurich and those on exchange there: They can benefit by acquiring, developing and sharing skills and knowledge that they contribute on a public platform where others may potentially discover and use them. Moreover, by becoming part of a community, student teachers can further develop their ideas and insights by working together with others to support their learners in the language acquisition process by means of narrative across various media formats. The blog entries they write during their studies may mark the beginning of a journey, an asset that hopefully will transform into “a resource one draws on for a lifetime” (Davidson 2011: 86). The preliminary results of this modest project certainly encourage continued efforts to establish multiliteracies in English teacher education.