Multilingual English second language students’ voice in digital storytelling

Abstract

Digital storytelling is a productive approach to engaging multilingual students in creative, expressive, and practical tasks to increase their English language development and meaningful thinking. Based on previous research, digital storytelling helps students stay motivated, expand their communication skills, and create narratives with multiple multimodal features (Robin, 2008; Reinders, 2011; Tecnam, 2012). This study expands on previous research by exploring voice in students’ digital storytelling to showcase their identities. A mixed-method study investigated whether the same author's voice could be differentiated among the raters. Therefore, 25 participants were recruited and asked to watch ten pairs of digital stories to evaluate linguistic and multimodal aspects of the stories and either attribute them or not to the same author. The study results indicated that the raters could distinguish between digital stories authored by the same multilingual ESL writer and those crafted by different writers, thus proving that multilingual ESL learners implement voice in their digital stories. The study also revealed that the raters relied on certain multimodal and linguistic features while making their decisions, therefore underlying the importance of developing those multimodal elements in multilingual classrooms. Finally, the study offers numerous activities that can be implemented in multilingual classrooms to develop ESL students’ voices and shape their identities.