Alexandra Krasova, Ph.D. Candidate in Composition and Applied Linguistics, DRC Fellows 2023-24
This study focused on multilingual ESL students living in different countries and having different proficiency in English. This research describes arts-based practices of multilingual students through digital storytelling and examines their influence on global understanding and multicultural communication.
Despite academic popularity of art-based approaches in some fields, they received limited attention in education. Moreover, there is some resistance to adopt them as teaching recourses, namely the concern of incorporating these practices into curriculum and assessment. With this project I argue that educators should overcome this resistance and envisage these approaches to encourage classroom transformation.
There are two stories created by undergraduate multilingual ESL students. After the description of the stories, you will find pedagogical applications of multimodal tasks in ESL and multilingual classrooms to promote global understanding and ensure multicultural communication.
Story 1
The first example is a story created by an ESL student who shared the importance of English in her life. As she explained during the interview, English has influenced her identity in multiple ways since she started learning it in her childhood and further depicts the steps how her English learning progresses influences her life. She mentioned “emotional support” of her family and friends “while experiencing difficulties in understanding some English rules.” She finishes her story describing how she uses English at university, communicates on the internet and while traveling. She underlines that English helps her “feel connected to the whole world and opens a lot of opportunities,” thus emphasizing global understanding and promoting multicultural communication.
Story 2
Another story, written by an undergraduate ESL student, also shows how important it is for this student to speak English and how it helps them to “share cultures while making international friends, traveling, and communication with different people.” This student also emphasizes “the opportunity to study in different countries with sufficient English level,” which opens various career and academic opportunities. She claims that speaking English enables her to “read books in original and watch movies internationally.”
This undergraduate student is also persuaded in “English language capacity to broaden the horizons and remove boundaries” since she can communicate freely with people from all over the world. She mentions that learning English gives her the opportunity to “see and understand the world,” which confirms that leaning English promotes global understanding and intercultural communication.
These two stories demonstrate that English as a second language opens opportunities for students and provides them with a chance to understand the world better while traveling, communicating, or studying. Arts-based research in ESL classrooms creates space for exploration, thus encouraging critical thinking. Representation of global understanding through arts-based research, namely, storytelling, helps ESL students focus on the most important aspects of multiculturalism and integrate their vision into multimodal composition.
Pedagogical Implications:
There are multiple ways and forms educators can integrate storytelling into their ESL classrooms. It can be done through a photo essay project, listicles, assigning different podcasts, digital narrative stories, creating videos, interviews, etc. Educators can be creative while developing students’ creativity.
My study highlighted the benefits of digital storytelling use in the classroom as a way to promote global understanding and multicultural communication. Relying on the results, I offer several ideas of the activities that might promote global understating:
1) Multimodal Digital Story
2) Multimodal Poster (canva.com)
3) Translanguaging Comic Page
You can find detailed instructions of these three assignments in my article published in TESOL New Ways in Teaching Visual Literacy (Alexandra Krasova).
4) Multilingual Blog writing (wordpress.com)
Students could use multiple languages to ensure multicultural communication; it is also great for responding to each other’s post, thus enlarging the scope of the audience.
5) Tri Folded Brochure (canva.com)
This assignment can encourage students to create brochures about their countries, hobbies, events, social issues, etc. to promote intercultural communication.
If you are interested to learn more about the project or looking for collaboration, please feel free to contact me through Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Krasova.Alexandra) or email (alexkrasova@gmail.com).
