Constructing Identities in Online Encounters: A Study on Finnish and Greek Young Studentss Digital Storytelling Practices

Abstract

This study aims to examine digital storytelling practices of young students from Finland and Greece in intercultural encounters online. In such settings, the students construct their virtual selves as authors and computer users through visual (or video-based) and linguistic (or text-based) interactions with the connected, imagined peers. In other words, the young people perform identity work in digital storytelling. As they do so, they resignify reality by developing strategies in order to, for instance, fit new into current practices and build authority as L2 speakers. It is therefore crucial to understand how identity construction takes place by bringing to the fore the strategies young people use to make sense of reality. Considering these, we look at the online encounters of young students as spaces of intertextuality where the utterances of different speakers blend and resignify the context of learning and draw from linguistics and SLA research, and social semiotics for the analysis. To make ends meet, we discuss and analyze how the Finnish and Greek students represent the themes of the digital stories, the subtitles they add and the comments they post in relation to their views about digital storytelling and the imagined peers. For this purpose, we look into digital stories as combinations of multiple semiotic systems and use inductive analysis for the interviews as well as discourse analysis in order to understand the structure underlying subtitles and comments. The findings indicate that the students use different strategies to pass the message through their digital stories. In single-event stories, for instance, they adopt an impersonal, scientific-like style to explain how a chemical reaction happens, by focusing on the process and displaying objects and equipment. In multiple-event stories, the focus is placed on human relationships and theme representation comes out in a more personal style through body language and gesture. Considering the age and the needs of the students, this seems to be a more authentic approach. However, the way language is used, whether spoken (i.e., the script of the story) or written (i.e., in subtitles), lacks naturalness and is more grammar-based than communication oriented. Overall, the digital stories present versions of themes in a serialized form, which is in agreement with the quality of the digital text to be perpetually edited, remixed and shared online. It seems, however, that, rather than language use, it is the way the story is performed and acted out that authenticates the students’ work.