It's More than Just A-Z: Co-engaging tertiary students in Digital Storytelling through the Multimodalities-Entextualisation Cycle

Digital storytelling has become a promising hybrid genre in EAL/ ESL contexts in higher education. To co-engage tertiary students to develop their digital multimodal composing (DMC) competence and creativity, the Multimodalities-Entextualisation Cycle (MEC) (Lin, 2016; 2020) has been adopted by the teacher-researcher as both a curriculum genre and heuristic teaching/ learning tool in a digital storytelling course designed for 30 tertiary students in Hong Kong. Theoretically, the MEC facilitates dynamic flows of multimodal meaning making resources in ecologically harmonized educational settings across ethnicities and communicative repertoires. In this conference paper, the presenter first introduces design-based research focusing on translanguaging and trans-semiotizing in the research and pedagogical scopes of DMC in higher education. Through activating three key stages of the MEC, the presenter showcases empirical MEC-guided classroom examples for leveraging plurilingual and pluricultural tertiary students' trans-semiotic agency and creativity in DMC. Data generation involves collecting individual research informants' digital language portraits (Bush, 2012; Mu et. al., 2024), visual storyboards, bilingual written scripts and digital storytelling production logs. This presentation prioritizes to (1) explicate dynamic roles of AI-guided teacher-to-student and student-to-student dialogic scaffolding in digital storytelling through both formal and informal epistemological sources. The presentation also aspires tertiary educators to (2) co-create digitally transformative practice for transcending monolingual and logocentric practice in EAL/ ESL contexts. Most significantly, research and pedagogical implications of engaging plurilingual teachers and students with digital storytelling and technology-enriched multimodal meaning-making may promote more socially inclusive digital trans-semiotic landscapes. This paper resonates the call for engaging teachers and students inside and outside classrooms to critically reflect on pushing the limits (Li & Lin, 2019) of traditional linear patterns of A-Z knowledge-making. This paper highlights the research and pedagogical potentials in co-exploring non-hierarchical development of digital literacies in higher education which digitally transforms self-access learning and personal growth.