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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.
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