Innovative Methods and Practices of Academic Writing and Writing Instruction
DIGITAL STORYTELLING IN THE L2 ACADEMY WRITING CLASSROOM: EXPANDING THE POSSIBILITIES OF EXPRESSION AND LEARNING.
Joel Bloch
Independent scholar (retired), Shawnee Hills Ohio, USA
The implementation of multimodal literacies into the L2 composition classroom can foster alternative linguistic and rhetorical resources that can still be used in traditional academic writing assignments... These new literacies can be more inclusive for NNES by allowing them to utilize their technological skills, multiple forms of literacy, and personal experiences to better understand traditional forms of academic writing (Lea & Street, 2006). I will discuss the challenge of implementing the various written, visual, and aural literacies incorporated in a multimodal digital story (Lambert 2012) into a traditional L2 academic writing class that focuses on questions of plagiarism and intellectual property usage. I will examine one digital story to explore the different skills connected to voice, textual borrowing, and argumentation associated with both print and multimodal contexts. I argue that this approach gave students a different perspective that could help them when using whichever form of literacy they used. Similar to using traditional academic literacies, creating digital stories incorporates transformative textual borrowing through remixing the voice of the author with both visual and aural texts. This “remixing” of these different forms of intellectual property (Lessing, 2009) is not unusual in academic writing since all forms of academic writing explicitly interweaves texts, transforming them into new texts by adding the author’s personal story about the research and the reasons supporting the research (e.g. Bazerman, 1988). We have found that our students’ digital stories exhibit multiple forms of language while utilizing similar rhetorical skills found in traditional academic research, which we hoped promote translingual pedagogies through the use of the digital texts for more personal forms of expression (Hull & Nelson, 2005).
References
Bazerman, C 1988, Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the experimental article in science , The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.
Hull, G.A. & Nelson, M.E. (2005). Locating the semiotic power of multimodality. Written Communication , 22, 22426
Lambert, J 2012, Digital storytelling: Capturing lives, creating community (3rd ed.), Center for the Study of Digital Storytelling, Berkeley, CA.
Lea, M & Street BV 2006, The “academic literacies” model: Theory and applications. Theory into Practice , vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 368377.
Lessing, L 2009), Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy, Penguin, New York.