A brief CV

Dr. Teresa Fleta is an experienced teacher, teacher trainer and researcher. She holds a PhD in English Philology in the area of Child Language Acquisition from Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. Her main research areas are early years language education; teaching English to young learners; children’s picturebooks; classroom-based research; discourse analysis and teacher education and development. Currently, she is Honorary Collaborator at the School of Education at Complutense University of Madrid.

Crafting puppets for storytelling

Within the techniques for teaching English as an additional language, there is a significant absence at all educational levels of strategies to develop students’ oral communication skills. Normally, it is reading and writing that occupy a leading role in educational programs.

After a quick reflection on the importance of teaching students to listen and speak to construct meaning, the grammar of languages, social competences and also reading and writing, the presentation goes on to describe a multimodal project on the creation of stories and puppets carried out with teaching students. The talk will end with a reflection on the findings of this pedagogical experience that indicate that these multimodal techniques are effective not only to boost the oral skills of students, but also to promote creativity, literacy and social skills.