Innovation in Language Learning

Digital storytelling, which is about the combination of media and technology with traditional storytelling to help students learn, has lately been considered as an effective tool in instructional environments. This paper examines the effects of the digital storytelling experience on pre-service language teachers’ perceived self-efficacy towards integration of educational technology to teach English to young learners. With this aim in mind, the researcher prepared two-hours training on what is a digital story and how it can be prepared with educational purposes, more specifically language teaching. The qualitative study was conducted in Spring semester 2016-2017, at a pre-service teacher education department of a state university in Turkey. The data for the current study was gathered through pre-service language teachers’ lesson plans and open-ended questionnaire. In order to be able to answer the research questions, the document analysis was carried out with lesson plans prepared by pre-service language teachers followed by the content analysis of pre-service language teachers’ answers to the open-ended questionnaire with the concurrent themes noted down. The findings indicated that the participants of the study had self-efficacy towards integration of educational technology in TEYL. However, when their self-efficacy towards the use of digital stories in TEYL was examined, no such improvement can be observed. Implications for future research and policy makers are provided. 

Keywords: Digital storytelling, pre-service language teachers, perceived efficacy.