‘Guys, you won’t believe what happened to me!’ Storytime Videos and Narrative Competences in the EFL Classroom.

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Abstract

When the first video was released onYouTubein 2005, no one could have anticipated the immense success this video platform would achieve within only one and a half decades: today,YouTubeplays an essential part in the everyday life of a younger generation and, following the motto ‘Broadcast Yourself’, offers a plethora of narrative video-formats that invite children and teenagers to share their own story with a large audience. One of the most popular formats in this context is the so-calledStorytimevideo, in which a youtuber gets in front of a camera to tell stories about important events in his/her own biography. By now, this narrative type of video belongs to the standard repertoire of successfulYouTubechannels, thus showing how relevant everyday, oral storytelling still is as a practice of narratively constructing the self in a digital age. Considering this popularity and relevance among teenagers, it is surprising to see thatStorytimehas been utterly neglected in foreign language research so far. Our presentation will fill this gap by examining some of the potentials and learning opportunities this autobiographical form of video-narration can offer to a modern EFL classroom. More specifically, we will focus on howStorytimevideos can help to foster narrative competences. In this context, we will reflect on current models of narrative competence, which mostly focus on analogue narratives (cf. Nünning/Nünning 2003 & 2010, Ruhm 2014, Volkmann 2015), and argue thatStorytimenarratives, asdigitalnarratives, require a reconsideration of former models to fully capture what competent students need to narratively participate in and contribute to a digital society.

Speakers from the University of Münster

Becker, Daniel	Professorship for English teaching methodology (Prof. Matz)
Matz, Frauke	Professur für Englische Fachdidaktik (N. N.)