SparkTales: Facilitating Cross-Language Collaborative Storytelling through Coordinator-AI Collaboration

Cross-language collaborative storytelling plays a vital role in children's language learning and cultural development, fostering both expressive ability and intercultural awareness. Yet, in practice, children's participation is often shallow, and facilitating such sessions places heavy cognitive and organizational burdens on coordinators, who must coordinate language support, maintain children's engagement, and navigate cultural differences. To address these challenges, we conducted a formative study with coordinators to identify their needs and pain points, which guided the design of SparkTales, an intelligent support system for cross-language collaborative storytelling. SparkTales leverages both individual and common characteristics of participating children to provide coordinators with story frameworks, diverse questions, and comprehension-oriented materials, aiming to reduce coordinators' workload while enhancing children's interactive engagement. Evaluation results show that SparkTales not only significantly increases coordinators' efficiency and quality of guidance but also improves children's participation, providing valuable insights for the design of future intelligent systems supporting cross-language collaboration.