What is it about?
Through making digital stories (i.e., podcasts) with refugee children, undergraduates from a service-learning subject in Hong Kong expanded their creative potential with English, which has been considered a conventional instrument for education and career advancement in Hong Kong. With the rapid development of GenAI, the students preferred "owning" their stories to delegating the whole story creation process to the tool. Overall, the students' digital storytelling experience with GenAI enhanced their linguistic, cultural and digital awareness.
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Why is it important?
The English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners portrayed in this study learn English beyond more conventional goals such as "grammatical accuracy" or "better career prospects", but for creative and communicative purposes instead. This has implications for motivating students to "use" English in authentic settings rather than merely "learn" it in the classroom. Additionally, GenAI did not overshadow the students' own "voices", as they exercised agency and chose to use GenAI peripherally and support their creative process.
Perspectives
When we wrote this paper, the service-learning subject was run for the second time, when the GenAI hype impacted Hong Kong higher education (e.g., initial AI bans, races to build institution-owned GenAI tools). Our students were apparently "resistant" to GenAI tools when creating their own stories (not assessed); to our surprise, one or two of our students admitted to having used GenAI for their assessed personal reflection essay. We wonder whether it was because students were less confident in writing in more academic "registers" than creative ones, in which they were allowed to express themselves; or because they (mistakenly) believed that GenAI would give them "more accurate" answers in assessed tasks. While we may continue our explorations of how students create their stories with GenAI, we are more interested in how this storytelling SL subject "liberates" them from conventional language learning through multimodal artefacts (e.g., podcasts, workshop materials, games).
Lok Ming Eric Cheung
Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Co-creating stories with generative AI, Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, December 2024, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/aral.24101.che.
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