Learner Characteristics in Telecollaborative Multilingual Digital Storytelling: A sociocultural Approach to Understanding Technology-Mediated Intercultural Meaning Co-construction

• In Event: Roundtable Session 10

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Summary

Leaning on Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of dialogism and Fairclough’s (2003) concepts of assumption/intertextuality, the presenters will describe a telecollaborative multilingual digital storytelling project that aimed to explore what participants brought to the process of co-construction and how that could have affected what they have gained from the experience.

Abstract

Digital storytelling is the traditional art of storytelling in its modern form. Teachers are discovering its merits of improving students’ digital literacy, language competence, and collaborative skills. Research has also shown that it may give power to participants to share knowledge, ideas, and culture in ways that traditional storytelling could not provide. Nevertheless, research efforts to date have been focusing on affordances of digital storytelling as a mediational tool, little has been explored as what participants themselves brought to the process of co-construction and how that could have affected what they have gained from the experience. Our exploratory study is an attempt to fill this chasm in literature. In this project, pre-service French as a second language teachers in Canada and university-level EFL students in Taiwan were linked to co-construct multilingual digital stories. The participants had three months to communicate, make decisions, and complete their stories on topics of their own choosing. The researchers collected the records of their correspondences, including discussion forum postings, Facebook postings, email messages, and Skype recordings, as well as the finished multilingual digital stories, for analysis. To understand how the participants negotiated to accomplish the digital storytelling assignments and how their own voices, which are deep-rooted in their culture and inherent beliefs and value, have been expressed during the co-construction processes and in their completed digital stories, the researchers lean on Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of dialogism and Fairclough’s (2003) concepts of assumption/intertextuality for data analysis. Interviews and surveys were also conducted for deeper understandings. The findings unveil both interpersonal and sociocultural dimensions of meaning negotiation in technology-mediated collaboration. The researchers also discuss pedagogical challenges and prospects of using multilingual digital storytelling as a transformational tool for intercultural learning, creativity, and language development, as well as a space for voicing selves through creative literary articulation.

Strand

• Language and Technology

Presenters

• Sabrina Priego, Université Laval

• Meei-Ling Liaw, National Taichung University of Education