Identifying Young Learners' Narrative Identity Formation through Known and Unknown Digital Short Stories

Due to the Covid-۱۹ pandemic situation and informed with current definitions of identity formation/construction through online platforms, the present article reports back an English language teacher’s efforts on narrative identity construction against four Iranian, young students with regard to their inclinations to regenerate stories presented to them via illustrated, digital stories in a second language (here, English) via online classes. The sampled learners were a group of four kids (both male and female) with an age range of ۹-۱۲, who took part in three consecutive online semesters managed through Sky Room in the summer, ۲۰۲۰. The selected materials were some ten randomly illustrated, digital stories. The whole program took two months with three sessions each week totaling twenty-four sessions in all for each three-semester. Students’ behavior was closely screened and collected through frequent field notes and recorded sessions. The findings revealed students’ tendency towards regenerating/narrating the known stories they had either read in their first language during their previous school education such as “the Lion and the Mouse” fables or watched randomly via original home videos such as “the clever monkey”. Their word recall range and selection of the stories for the presentation were also screened, which showed they remembered the words from familiar stories better and for their presentation, they did not show any inclinations towards unknown stories such as “sneaky rabbit”. Possible interpretations over narrative identity construction in l۲ contexts were finally proposed as mapped on cross-languaging trends.