Multimodal Discourse in Digital Storytelling: An Assessment Tool Proposal

Abstract

COVID-19 has had an impact at all levels of education. In the field of foreign language learning, educators have had to adapt the techniques and tools that they used in the physical classroom to an online environment with the implications that this involves in many different ways such as it is the case of assessment. In this paper, we will describe the use of digital storytelling for English for Specific Purposes as part of a hybrid teaching scenario in a specialized translation course at the University of Alcalá (Spain). In an online context, digital storytelling involves many elements that technology imposes and thus assessment of students’ communicative competence can no longer be done traditionally. This paper aims to propose an assessment tool to help trainers evaluate students’ digital stories considering all the important elements of multimodal discourse, to adapt to this new teaching reality. This will be an innovative proposal since a comprehensive tool has not been created yet that goes beyond the mere assessment of communicative competence.