No abstract

No abstract

This paper reports an intercultural telecollaboration project between four pre- and in-service second/foreign language teachers that sought to analyze how knowledge was co-constructed among team members through online social negotiation. Data consisting of transcripts of two conversations using the conferencing platform Skype were analyzed using a taxonomy adapted from Gunawardena, Lowe and Anderson’s (1997) model.  It was found that the highest amount of utterances (62%) fell into Phase I (Sharing/comparing of information) and that few occurrences fell into higher phases of negotiation of meaning (Phases IV and V). These findings raised awareness regarding task’s design, structure and content in order to foster higher levels of negotiation of meaning and to prevent potential lack of involvement.

Although a growing number of studies have recently been focusing on the affordances of digital storytelling as a multimodal tool, relatively little attention has been given to the collaborative process during digital story construction and how that may affect what the participants gain from the experience. This paper focuses on an intercultural telecollaborative multilingual digital storytelling project between pre-service French as-a-second-language teachers in Canada and university-level EFL students in Taiwan. The researchers lean on Bakhtin's concept of dialogism and Fairclough's concepts of assumption/intertextuality to look into how the international partners negotiated to accomplish digital storytelling assignments, how their own voices were expressed during the telecollaborative writing process, and how this affected their completed digital stories. The findings of this study unveil both interpersonal and sociocultural dimensions of negotiation of meaning in technology-mediated collaboration. Based on the findings, the paper discusses 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.

No abstract