Presentation Game-based Digital Storytelling: Voices from EFL Learners more

This study aimed to investigate how EFL telecollaborators completed game-based digital storytelling tasks and how learners perceived its effectiveness. Participants were 30 non-English majors from a national university in northern Taiwan and an equal number of counterparts from a public university in Poland. During the semester-long project, participants were first introduced to a list of e-books containing classical myths and fairy tales; these served as input based on which students created their own stories. Using synchronous Zoom, they negotiated and selected a story to retell with variations of their own. They rewrote the script of the chosen story and used Twine, a digital platform for developing branching narratives, to design game-based digital stories. They published and shared their stories online, and commented on each group’s stories through pre-set criteria. Based on data from a post-task survey and semi-structured interviews, it was found that participants exercised their creativity in retelling stories, contributing ideas, elaborating on thoughts, making suggestions, and reaching conclusions during the co-construction process. Students had a sense of achievement in creating multi-modal products with game-based artifacts to express themselves. Such experiences with global peers also improved their intercultural competence, digital literacies, and game literacies.