Using Mediated Strategies In A Digital Storytelling Project: A Case Study Of EFL Writing

With the rapid development of global economy and the “going out, bringing in”strategic plan implemented in China, international exchanges have become morefrequently than ever before. English is playing an increasingly important role inChina’s communication with the world. As such, English teaching in China hasalways been a hot topic for educators and scholars. The aim of higher education is tocultivate senior talent for the country, as well as to focus on training language abilityof the students to communicate with the world. The training of listening, speaking,reading, writing and translating, however, is not balanced in college English teachingin China. English writing teaching is sometimes restricted to the examinations,ignoring the significance and functions in teaching. It is necessary to explore the waysto improve students’ writing skills and construct their own knowledge in writingprocess. The present study draws on activity theory to identify the writing strategiesadopted by the students in a digital storytelling project compares with those in anon-digital storytelling project. This study cannot only lend support to the multimodalteaching approach, but also inform the teaching of English writing in EFL context.In recent years, the topics of English writing have mostly concentrated onwriting pedagogy. Among the traditional teaching methods of writing, productapproach is the most widely used, which emphasizes the results of teacher-centeredteaching, and the output while completely ignoring the writing process. Processapproach focuses on students’ writing process, which can help the students understandthe writing process, fully mobilize the enthusiasm of the students and develop theirthinking in English. The writing process itself is the process of using writingstrategies, so the study on writing strategies is the analysis and generalization of thewriting process in reality. Although studies on writing strategies have beenlong-standing, the previous studies are mainly conducted from the cognitive perspective. Writing is a social activity which cannot be carried out just from students’inherence. Thus, students’ behaviors should also be taken into consideration whenanalyzing writing activity.Activity theory is proposed by Engestr m (1993), who believes that there ismediation between subjects and objects in social activity which makes the subjects acton the objects through artificial tools and signs. Mediation is such a meditational toolor a sign which refers to the contact between stimulus and response. The role ofartificial tools is to regulate people’s external behaviors and the inner consciousness isdominated by the symbols. Mediation is dependent on the features of activities andgroups, and it changes depending on the changes of subjects and objects. Mediation,as the core concept of activity theory, is embodied in students’ choice of languagesand affiliated tools in the writing process. Hence, activity theory, especially mediationprovides profound theoretical foundation for researches on writing strategies.Adopting Halliday’s systematic-functional linguistics as an analytical framework,multimodal writing as a teaching approach, advocates the use of networks, pictures,music, role-playing and other channels to mobilize students to participate inmultisensory collaborative writing. Digital storytelling as a model for multimodalwriting mainly involves three modalities, namely, visual, auditive and tactilemodalities. Digital storytelling allows students to create their own stories based on theexisting experiences, so as to construct their own knowledge. The researches ondigital storytelling writing are inadequate in teaching EFL writing and few studiesfocus on writing strategies in digital storytelling projects from the perspective ofactivity theory. Therefore, the present study aims to probe the following twoquestions:1. What mediated strategies are used by EFL students in a digital storytellingwriting project?2. How are the students in the digital storytelling writing project different fromthose in a non-digital storytelling project in writing strategy use?The present study is a case study. The participants are three groups of students,10students in total, from a national key research oriented university in Northeast China. Taking the English writing course, students are arranged in groups to completea digital storytelling writing project and a non-digital storytelling writing project for aperiod of three weeks and two weeks respectively. Data are collected among the threegroups of students based on the researcher’s classroom observations, which haverevealed the students’ proficiency in English writing. The students consent toparticipate in the present study. The data are collected from students’“compositions”,classroom observations, classroom recordings and semi-structured interviews.The digital storytelling writing project consists of the process of brainstorming,drafting, peer review, story editing and presentation of the “compositions”. Based onthe analysis of the collected data, the participants in this digital storytelling writingproject, in face of a multimodal writing task, have adopted four main categories, ninesubcategories of mediation, namely, Internet-mediated strategy, onlinedictionary-mediated strategy, software-mediated strategy, L1/L2-mediated strategy,evaluation criteria-mediated strategy, time-mediated strategy, teacher-mediatedstrategy, peer-mediated strategy and author-mediated strategy. The findings reveal thatthe high level students use more writing strategies, and the quality of their“compositions” which is judged by the involved students in the projects, is in directproportion to the amount of the strategies. On the whole, the use of these strategiesplays a vital role in helping students to complete the writing tasks and improvestudents’ writing skills. Given the multimodal features, students can apply some aidedsoftware to retouch the images and denoise the records when editing the videos. Asmore modalities are involved in writing, there are more and more creative writingstrategies aiding to achieve success.Comparing the strategies used in the digital storytelling writing project and anon-digital storytelling writing project, students are required to present their writingsin the form of videos in the digital storytelling writing task, so students pay moreattention to the effects of their videos and reactions of the audience. In contrast to therequirements in the digital storytelling project, the presentation of the printed writtenwork is necessary in the non-digital storytelling project. Students are more concernedabout the word use, and even the number of word amount and punctuation are considered. When evaluating their own works, the evaluation criteria of othermodalities including pictures and songs are taken into consideration in multimodalwriting, which is not covered in traditional one. These differences are due to thecomplex characteristics of the involvement of different modalities.The analysis of the data collected through interviews indicates that digitalstorytelling writing makes students feel less monotonous and prim, in which they canlearn to write in delightful moods. They regard themselves as masters of theclassroom, rather than passive recipients. Students also emphasize that collaborativewriting has enhanced the friendship among them. It reveals that the students’ interestsare fully inspired in multimodal writing. The findings provide some implications forcourse design and the choice of teaching methods.Different from the previous studies on multimodal writing on discourse analysisand writing strategies, the present study is tentatively conducted to explore the writingstrategies used in a digital storytelling project. It not only enriches and replenishesteaching modes of multimodal writing, but also optimizes instructional design. Themultimodal writing approach has inspired the enthusiasm of the students andfacilitated students to participate in the mission that can be reflected in the use ofmore writing strategies. Though the present study is a case study with limitations, it isexpected that the findings can provide implications for further English writingteaching.