Innovation in Language Learning

Since the early days of civilization, storytelling has been used to share knowledge, values and wisdom from generation to generation. From cave inscriptions to hieroglyphics, to novels and movies, stories have always fascinated mankind and have been adopted as a means to not only preserve traditions and cultures but also to entertain and, in particular, instruct.
Over the past two decades, drastic changes have been experienced in the field of storytelling due to the advent of new media technologies (e.g. computers, smartphones, digital cameras, editing software) that have provided new tools to create and share stories more easily than ever before (Armstrong, 2003).
As a consequence, these technological advances have completely changed the way 21st century students – the so-called digital natives (Prensky, 2001), that are routinely exposed to digital technologies – communicate, interact, process information and learn.
By combining traditional storytelling with new digital multimedia, Digital Storytelling (DST) has progressively emerged as a powerful tool in teaching and learning as it provides a vehicle for encouraging on one side learners' motivation, attention, reflection and active learning and, on the other side, for helping teachers in building a constructivist learning environment that foster creative problem solving due to collaboration and peer-to-peer communication (Robin, 2006, 2008).
In particular, DST seems to play a fundamental role in Second Language Acquisition(SLA) because, due to the mixing of the textual and the visual, it not only empowers students to develop the necessary language and literacy skills (e.g. speaking, writing, listening and reading) (Christiansen, 2016) but also it provides them with a strong foundation in what have been defined as “21st century Skills” (P21 Framework, 2015).
According to these premises, this paper aims to draw a detailed analysis about the use of DST in education, with a particular focus on SLA. It specifically points to its development from its birth in the 1980s to today, how DST has changed over the years, which theoretical framework/concepts are adopted to support its innovative use in education, which are the tools recognised as most useful and what are its effects on teaching and learning.

Keywords: Digital Storytelling, Second Language Acquisition, Innovative Learning Environments, 21st Century Skills;