Exploring Practical and Potential Application of the Digital Storytelling Tool and Game, Twine and Elegy for a Dead World in Multimodal English Composition Class Setting

Abstract

The scenery of English rhetoric and composition teaching always changes according to the developments of composition technologies, such as the inventions of the press machine and the typewriter, and the change has been drastically promoted with the advent of digital technology and its multimodal texts. In the ongoing digital revolution, English rhetoric and composition teachers are required to exactly understand their own as well as their students’ identities to help students confront academic challenges critically and creatively. The current college students can be named as digital natives who use digitally created multimodal texts as the same as their native languages or willingly access the new digital technology and texts without hesitation. On the contrary, many teachers in the English discipline can be named as digital immigrants who are in the digital-multimodal-texts-as-a-second- language status - being more familiar with traditional texts - with struggling to teach the new way of composing multimodal texts, which are only available through the fluent level of digital tools. Therefore, for the aim to suggest an eclectic way for digital native students and digital immigrant teachers, as the hybrid between digital-multimodal texts’ active interactivity and traditional texts-based composition, the pedagogical utilization of digitally created but textuality- based interactive narrative would be one of the actualizable solutions. In that sense, the innovative digital storytelling (i.e., interactive narrative) composition tool, Twine, and the creative digital storytelling adventure game, Elegy for a Dead World, can effectively be used to teach students to improve their multimodal composition skills and literacy through non-linear narrative writing (from Twine) and creative thinking from visualized free writing (from Elegy for a Dead World), to assist them to communicate with the digital world.