Dr. Bianca Roters, Rachelle Breuer, Julia Fuchs & Anni Lenz (Pädagogische Hochschule Ludwigsburg)

Topic: Using Storytelling to Strengthen Well-Being in EFL Education

This webinar introduces Resilience Education in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) as a practice-oriented framework that strengthens pre-service EFL teachers’ and their future learners’ linguistic, emotional, and cognitive resilience through storytelling. Grounded in social equity, it empowers all learners—regardless of cultural or linguistic background—to express themselves, share their stories, and participate in meaningful communication. Central is a language of empathy and well-being and the role of stories in cultivating these capacities. Through (digital) storytelling and multimodal texts, we explore how narrative practices foster empathy, agency, democratic awareness, and early literacy both in pre-service EFL teachers’ own studies and in the classrooms they will teach in the future.

The webinar presents EFL classroom examples and teacher-education practices that integrate reflective storytelling to envision a future of empathy in early literacy work. Drawing on the EMPATHICS vision and research on agency, we also share insights from a study on pre-service EFL teachers’ personal and academic reading journeys. These findings show how future EFL teachers can create learning environments where stories build resilience, belonging, and hopeful engagement with an unpredictable world.