Bringing the World Into a Young Learner Classroom Through Teacher Created Multimodal Materials in Serbia

This chapter provides a rationale for using teacher-created and adapted materials when teaching English to young learners and explores the possibilities for designing appropriate materials for effective theme-based instruction that focuses on current global themes. The increasing interconnectedness of people globally highlights the importance of English as a global means of communication and supports the trend of spreading early English language instruction throughout the world, while extremely fast changes in all life spheres stress the need to integrate twenty-first century skills and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNESCO in Education for sustainable development goals: Learning objectives. United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2017) into a foreign language curriculum. These trends aim to empower children to thrive in the globalized multimodal world where intercultural communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, digital and media literacy, have been recognized as key competences by national primary curricula, Serbia included. The chapter proposes an effective whole-child approach to developing these skills: bringing the world into the classroom by applying cross-curricular language teaching and by creating and adapting multimodal materials based on freely available authentic resources, such as printed or digital pictures, maps, picture books, or video clips, audio materials, and games. Finally, the chapter offers a multitude of ideas for creating materials and activities that can simultaneously contribute to children’s language proficiency, understanding of sustainability, and sustainable lifelong language learning and enthusiasm.