Innovation in Language Learning

Digital storytelling has emerged over the last few years as a powerful teaching and learning tool that engages both teachers and their students.  This paper gives a model of teaching EFL to tertiary level students in that it adopts the use of ICT especially digital storytelling as a medium to enhance the students English language skills.

Digital storytelling is the art of telling stories through the use of various multimedia such as text, images, audio and video.  Digital storytelling combines the functions of visualizing and verbalizing, which are essential for language comprehension and thinking. Adopting new technology like digital camera to classroom could give the students more opportunities to explore their environment as well as personal experiences to produce a narration that will subsequently be presented in class.

The seven elements of digital storytelling as proposed by the Center for Digital Storytelling (2005) were used as the bases for making digital storytelling for the students.  The process of making the storytelling required the students to apply their productive skills, that is writing and speaking.  In this study, the students were assigned to produce a narration under a certain theme through the process of drafting, peer commenting, proofreading, and revising to make a final version before recording.  As these steps were taking place, the  students were also required to provide or catch images suitable for the story.  Then audio background was needed to go with the story to leave the audience with more impressions of the digital storytelling.