Does a multimodal narrative workshop enhance motivation in multicultural class? A exploratory study in a primary schoolLe attività narrative multimodali accrescono la motivazione nelle classi multiculturali? Uno studio esplorativo in una scuola primaria

Today’s teachers face a double challenge: to raise the students’ communicative and narrativeskills, while at the same time maintaining a high level of motivation even in the face of the diffi-culties caused by the use of Italian as L2. In this context, the use of multimodal narrative activitiescan be effective, allowing everyone to find their own most congenial way of expression. In aclass of 8-9 year olds with a high rate of foreign students, we organized a multimodal storytellingworkshop based on an adaptation of Shakespeare’s work “The merchant of Venice”. Eighteenchildren tried their hand at listening, shadow theatre, drawing, confrontation, writing and digitalstorytelling. At each step, we measured their motivation for storytelling, trying to understandwhich activities produced the greatest effects. Results show that foreign children start with alower perception of their narrative skills and perceive a higher effort. However, at the end of theworkshop the two groups finished with very close results. Children feel more confident com-municating by acting but the set of experienced modalities motivated children to narrate. Wehave recorded a steady interest by the children, and despite some difficulties, they showed per-severance and determination in the assigned tasks, bringing them to completion