“There’s always an option”: Collaborative Writing of Multilingual Interactive Fanfiction in a Foreign Language Class

Oct 15, 2026

Digital storytelling practices thrive in transcultural and multilingual online spaces and align with Maker culture through learning-through-doing, bricolage, collaboration, and play. This paper reports a pedagogical intervention within the FanTALES project, using creative writing and meaning-making to design activities for secondary learners producing multilingual interactive fanfiction. Students of English as a foreign language (N=21) created stories based on Assassin’s Creed, and qualitative focus-group analysis indicates intrinsic motivation and language-related skill development, while highlighting challenges with autonomy, task openness, source-text knowledge, and project management.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages26

Reading Time1 h 6 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Digital wilds and new literacy practices

FanTALES project and pedagogical aims

Plurilingual competencies and multiliteracies

calico journal (online) issn 2056–9017 Article “There’s always an option”: Collaborative Writing of Multilingual Interactive Fanfiction in a Foreign Language Class Frederik Cornillie 1,2, Judith Buendgens-Kosten3, Shannon Sauro4,5, and Joeri Van der Veken 1,6 Abstract In the digital wilds, thriving storytelling practices (often in transcultural and multilingual contexts) share with Maker culture a belief in learning through doing, bricolage, collaboration, and playfulness. Key examples are fanfiction, a form of creative writing that transforms popular media in some way, and interactive fiction, a form of nonlinear narrative that verges on the world of gaming. This paper documents a pedagogical intervention carried out within the FanTALES project, which leverages creative writing and meaning-making practices from the digital wilds, in order to develop teaching and learning activities that engage secondary school learners in the writing of multilingual interactive fanfiction. Adolescent learners of English as a foreign language (N=21) wrote multilingual interactive fanfiction based on the digital game series Assassin’s Creed. Qualitative content analysis of focus groups with these learners suggests that they experienced intrinsic motivation and developed skills in language and Affiliations 1Department of Linguistics, KU Leuven, Belgium. email: [frederik.cornillie@kuleuven.be](frederik.cornillie@kuleuven.be) 2ITEC, imec research group at KU Leuven, Belgium. 3Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. [email: ](email: buendgens-kosten@em.uni-frankfurt.de)[buendgens-kosten@em.uni-frankfurt.de](email: buendgens-kosten@em.uni-frankfurt.de) 4University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Department of Education, USA. email: [ssauro@umbc.edu](ssauro@umbc.edu) 5Malmö University, Department of Culture, Languages and Media, Sweden. 6Sint-Jozefscollege Aalst, Belgium. [email: j](email: j.vanderveken@kuleuven.be)[.vanderveken@kuleuven.be](email: j.vanderveken@kuleuven.be) calico journal vol 38.1 2021 17–42 [https://doi.org/10.1558/cj.41119](https://doi.org/10.1558/cj.41119) © 2021, equinox publishing 18 “There’s always an option” storytelling as well as transversal competences. They also dealt with a lowered sense of autonomy due to the open-endedness of the tasks, and struggled with a lack of sufficient knowledge about storytelling practices and the source text, as well as with project management. Potential improvements for the pedagogical implementation include more scaffolding of the tasks, and better integration with curriculum and assessment. Keywords:fanfiction, interactive fiction, multilingualism, collaborative writing, Maker culture, multiliteracies. Introduction New literacy practices are thriving in the digital wilds, namely, informal online spaces, communities, and networks that are independent of formal educational contexts (Sauro & Zourou, 2019). In these spaces, language users are collaboratively telling, performing, discussing, and transforming new sorts of stories, often in transcultural and multilingual contexts. Key examples of such technology-mediated and participatory storytelling practices are fanfiction writing and the creation of interactive fiction (IF). They share with Maker culture a do-it-yourself ethos, bricolage, and playfulness, among other characteristics, and can, like Maker culture, be approached through the theoretical lenses of constructionism and multiliteracies for studying learning processes. While empirical evidence is emerging on the benefits of these storytelling practices for informal language learning, relatively little work has been done to document their pedagogical implementation in more institutionalized, formal learning contexts, especially in secondary schools, and in particular in interdisciplinary projects. This contribution therefore documents a pedagogical intervention that was carried out within the FanTALES project ([www.fantales.eu](www.fantales.

FAQs

What is the main focus of the paper?

The paper documents a pedagogical intervention (FanTALES) that uses creative writing to engage secondary school learners in producing multilingual interactive fanfiction.

Who participated in the study and what did they create?

Adolescent learners of English as a foreign language (N=21) wrote multilingual interactive fanfiction based on the digital game series Assassin’s Creed.

What benefits and challenges did learners report?

Qualitative analysis suggests intrinsic motivation and skill development, while also indicating reduced autonomy due to open-ended tasks and difficulties related to storytelling knowledge, source-text understanding, and project management.

Oct 15, 2026

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