Listening to the Multiple Voices in an Intercultural Telecollaborative Multilingual Digital Storytelling Project: A Bakhtinian perspective

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.