O n f e r e n c e

Short paper 
Description of the project 
Context 
Digital storytelling is the traditional art of storytelling in its modern form. Research has 
shown that teachers who bring digital storytelling into their classrooms are discovering its 
merits of improving students’ digital literacy, language competence, as well as creativity 
and collaborative skills.

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-282- 
2014 CALL Conference 
LINGUAPOLIS
www.antwerpcall.be 
The community engagement in digital storytelling could give power to participants to 
share knowledge, ideas, and culture in ways that traditional storytelling could not provide 
in the past.
The writing of multilingual digital stories also finds support 
in James Cummins’ (1978, 
2000) theory of language interdependence which suggests that the use of the students’ 
L1 enhances the intellectual and academic resources of individual bilingual students.
 
In our study, groups of students from different countries (Canada and Taiwan) with 
diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds were linked by co-constructing multilingual 
digital stories on topics of their own choosing. The Canadian students were pre-service 
FSL teachers. The class was composed of sixteen francophone students, five Spanish-
speaking students who have been living in Quebec for several years, and one English-
speaking exchange student. The students from Taiwan were learning English as a foreign 
language.
The objective of the joint venture was to provide the two groups of participants with the 
opportunity to engage in digital storytelling to give voices to themselves and others. At 
the same time, 
culture and inherent beliefs and values can be expressed during the co-
construction processes and shared via discussion. 
Data collection for the study included 
the students’ correspondences, their digital stories, interviews and an end
-of-project 
survey.
Process 
Students from both classes worked in teams of seven to nine students. Each team was 
composed of five to seven students from Taiwan and two or three students from Quebec.
The students from the two classes established a first contact by e-mail and then 
communicated with each other by email, Facebook or via the discussion forum in their 
websites. Before the project commenced, the professors from both classes showed their 
students how to create digital stories and to work together on the project website. As 
part of their EFL class, previous to the Quebec-Taiwan collaborative project, the students 
from Taiwan had already created three digital stories. Having had experience with the 
project website, they were in charge of creating the Wix accounts. The participating 
students co-created a trilingual digital story (French, English and Chinese) with their 
overseas partners by selecting a topic that matched their own interests with the 
curriculum goals. Then, the students recorded their stories in their L1.