Challenging intercultural discomforts: Intercultural communicative competence through digital storytelling

Abstract

Discomfort perceived by speakers in intercultural situations becomes one of the main psychological factors which makes speakers give up attempts at communication and may result in frustration or inefficient communication. The article discusses the pedagogical potential of digital storytelling, understood as multimodal pedagogy that encourages creative expression and self-representation, as a tool for challenging and mitigating perceived communicational and intercultural discomfort within the context of intercultural competence development and training. The authors argue that collaborative digital storytelling in multicultural teams raises intercultural awareness by creating a safe, structured, and facilitated (virtual) space for students to develop their ability to interact with people from another country and culture in a foreign language and represents a viable tool of challenging and overcoming intercultural discomfort by providing an opportunity for repeated intercultural interaction through negotiation of meaning and intersubjective construction of knowledge as well as by providing motivating real-life context for students’ work. In supporting dialogic and constructivist approaches to educational practice, digital storytelling is fully equipped to provide a viable alternative to direct instruction and transmissive models of teaching. In addition to this, by providing a digital element, digital storytelling allows students to reflect on the culturally as well as technologically mediated nature of communication.