Digital storytelling for non-background learners of Chinese : a case study of a primary school in Australia

Abstract

With the proliferation of technology, digital storytelling has become a popular strategy used in the second language learning classroom. Despite its widely cited benefits, digital storytelling is not common in the context of teaching and learning Chinese as a foreign language. Adopting a case study methodology, this study aimed to examine the affordances and challenges of using digital storytelling to teach Chinese to non-background learners in an Australian primary school where Chinese language lessons were incorporated into its school curriculum. It also aimed to explore the scaffolding strategies needed to make Chinese learnable when non-background learners created digital stories to develop Chinese language skills. The study involved 32 Year 6 students (aged 11 to 12), and it employed a qualitative approach to analyse the data collected over a school term, which consisted of field notes from participant observations, transcripts of focus group discussion, and students' artefacts. I argue that digital storytelling was beneficial to the non-background learners, primarily in the retention of Chinese vocabulary and engaging them in the language learning process. Nevertheless, two key challenges were evident when digital storytelling was used to teach Chinese to the non-background learners. There was an overemphasis on technical aspects of the creating of digital stories given the limited ICT competency of the learners. Additionally, the linguistic characteristics of Chinese language created high levels of difficulty for the nonbackground learners to create digital stories entirely in Chinese. Given the challenges in adopting digital storytelling, appropriate scaffolding strategies were judiciously and reflectively developed to enable the non-background learners to use Chinese to create digital stories. The study showed that appropriate levels of scaffolds had to be progressively introduced; social scaffolding was the dominant type of scaffold that was viable, which included timely encouragement and prompting, sequential modelling and imitation, distancing, direction, and concurrent modelling and imitation. The findings of the study contribute to an understanding of how digital storytelling can be an innovative strategy for the teaching and learning of Chinese as a foreign language. It shows that teaching Chinese to non-background learners does not necessarily have to adopt the traditional approach of using rote learning. The research presented is one of the pioneering studies that experiment with technology to promote a more student-centred approach when teaching Chinese to non-background learners in Australia.

Date of Award	2018
Original language	English