Should Pre-Service Language Teachers Develop Digital Stories?: Engagement With Digital Storytelling

Introduction

Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of communication and has widely been used by teachers at all levels of education, from preschool to adult education. It has also been reported as an effective instructional method to facilitate learning outcomes in language, science, math, and technical education (Sharda, 2007). With the advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), today a variety of educational tools, such as Web 2.0 or mobile applications are available. Such improvements have also affected the way teachers design, develop, and use stories for teaching purposes and promoted the emergence of concepts such as digital storytelling (DST).

Digital Storytelling Association (2011, para. 1) provides a comprehensive description of this new concept: “Digital Storytelling is the modern expression of the ancient art of storytelling. Digital stories derive their power by weaving images, music, narrative and voice together, thereby giving deep dimension and vivid color to characters, situations, experiences, and insights”. DST is regarded as the combination of traditional storytelling with digital technologies. With today’s technology, it is possible to create DST by combining text, images, digital camera video, or audio with non-linear authoring tools, Web 2.0 applications, and computers. Digital storytellers publish their products in the forms of web pages, interactive web sites, digital audio, digital videos, online games, or virtual reality worlds (Xu, Park, & Baek, 2011).

With respect to their content and key features, digital stories (DS) can be classified in various ways. Based on content, Robin (2008) offers three types of DS: personal or narrative stories, stories that inform or instruct (the type focused on in this study), and stories that re-tell historical events. According to Park and Seo (2009), DST encompasses certain characteristics including flexibility, universality, interactivity, and community formation. DSs include point of view (the main point in the story and the author’s perspective), a dramatic question (a question that keeps the audience motivated), emotional content (establishing a powerful personal connection between the audience and the story), the gift of the narrators’ voice (personalization of the story for the audience), the power of the soundtrack (the music embedded), economy (presenting the content in a concise manner avoiding cognitive or sensory overload), and pacing (the rhythm of the story) (CDS, 2005).