Paper presentation Create your story with Her Story: Digital Game-Based Learning to Foster Creative Writing in English as a Foreign Language more

Sat, Jun 18, 17:00-17:30 Asia/Tokyo

The use of digital game-based instructional strategies has been demonstrated as encouraging students’ learning performances and motivation when learning a foreign language. Moreover, in recent years creativity has been emphasized as a key competence, and has gained considerable interest in many fields of education; however, creativity – and especially creative writing – is not so commonly developed in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) lessons. This study investigates how a digital game, Her Story, was used to promote BA students’ creative writing in EFL in two contexts: University of Lower Silesia, ULS (Poland) and University of Córdoba, UCO (Spain). This study uses the aforementioned digital game, which presents a murder mystery, and presents a creative writing project to provide an authentic learning opportunity through which students are able to develop their creativity, use EFL in a meaningful way, and enjoy while learning. The study participants had an intermediate-advanced FL knowledge (English Level B2-C1, CEFR). There were 17 female and 8 male study participants in ULS, and 22 female and 3 male participants in UCO. The study was conducted from October to December 2021. In this mixed-methods research, the quantitative study includes a pre-test and a post-test to explore students’ creativity in both contexts; while the qualitative study aims for the in-depth understanding of students’ creativity considering their own creative stories based on the plot of the game according to the three constructs of Torrence’s model of creativity (originality, flexibility, and elaboration). The results aim to demonstrate how students’ perceptions and writing tasks exhibit creativity, as well as how this type of projects can enhance students’ motivation and engagement in learning EFL.