Teaching (multi)literacies, supporting multilingual identities

Abstract

The EFL classroom can be a place in which students develop target language skills and overarching plurilingual competencies, but also their multilingual identities. Digital games – including interactive fiction (IF) – may play a role in this context, as participation in digital games and gaming practices has been claimed to afford identity work. This paper is based on a follow-up study for the “FanTALES” Erasmus+ project. Drawing on IF stories created in a pedagogic intervention and on follow-up focus group interviews, it finds that multilingual storytelling in an interactive fiction context was challenging for students, even though they self-assessed their productive plurilingual competencies as fairly high, and that the writing task itself was only partially successful in creating a ‘translanguaging space’ in which all linguistic resources could be used and valued.