Digital Storytelling

Digital story telling is also very interesting source for second language teaching. As stated in the article 7 things you should know about Digital Storytelling, “Digital story telling is the practice of combining narrative with digital content, including images, sound and video to create a short movie, typically with a strong emotional component.” As students learn language through many different ways actively, they could be more motivated and attentive in language learning.

It is also mentioned in the article that “creating and watching digital stories has the potential to increase the information literacy of a wide range of students.”

According to the article The Educational Uses of Digital Setting, “the topics that are used in digital storytelling range from personal tales to the recounting of historical events, from exploring life in one’s own community to the search for life in other corners of the universe, and literally, everything in between.” This implies that students can learn a lot of resources practicing through digital storytelling by themselves.

In this sense, in my future EFL/ESL class, I would teach my students to learn different culture and life style comparing between their culture and the American culture. I can divide them into small group, ask them to choose the culture topic and make digital story telling using pictures and videos. After that, each group can share the different resources which make them feel interesting since it is not just reading comprehension or listening without any visual aid.  

Another site Center for Digital Story Telling defines digital story as a short, first person video-narrative created by combining recorded voice, still and moving images, and music or other sounds. Thus, digital storytelling makes language learners feel fun, active and boosting to learn language without thinking ‘studying’, but ‘playing’.

Photo by : Jill Clardy