Innovation in Language Learning

Writing well, telling stories, and creating interest in the readers are techniques everyone can learn, provided rules from successful narratives are followed. This editorial project describes how a group of twenty 10th graders has honed and poured their creativity within an original volume of stories, using Artificial Intelligence. In the “preliminary phase,” a local editor instructed the students on the most important techniques governing the narration phases, he also illustrated a set of successful editing mechanisms alongside the tough paths to publication. In the “engaging phase”, the Italian and the English teachers provided learners with the foundations of storytelling (plots, settings, characters, conflicts, resolution, points of view) through a range of examples from various works of literature, cinema, and TV series, carefully selected from customized AI prompts. In the “workshop phase”, the students’ creative sparks were collaboratively guided into a collection of twenty stories, purposefully titled “Twenty Worlds, by Storytellers” (Italian and English Language). The “performance phase” involved all classmates in the final presentation of their manuscript to relatives and friends followed by a copy-sign event in a local bookshop spent convincing new readers to buy the remaining copies, after signing them. Digital, literacy, and communication competences increased together with teamwork, entrepreneurship, and multilingual skills and contributed to the volume’s sold-out.