Investigating 21st Century Skills in Digital Storytelling for English Teaching

• Main Authors: Ming-Chun Wei, 魏名君
• Other Authors: Chien-Han Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/14129972952822526384

碩士 === 華梵大學 === 外國語文學系碩士班 === 102 === In digital times, an enormous revolution has been changing people’s daily lives, including digital tools being applied to education. Gils (2005) suggested digital storytelling as a tool to provide more advantages in modern classrooms. Digital storytelling is a modern storytelling art to share knowledge or express cultures from different countries with technological media (The Digital Story Association, 2002). Learners see stories as a problem case to be solved, as knowledge to be realized, and as a helper to acquire inspiration from a case to assist learning in education (Jonassen & Hernandez-Serrano, 2002). The new citizens of the 21st century live in a diverse learning environment as technology tools have created a new digital generation. However, it must be concerned, even though numerous resources are available on the Internet for education, young learners nowadays may not employ it well in their own learning. Therefore, the purpose of the study is to investigate under the framework of 21st Century Skills (The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2009), how young learners may apply digital storytelling successfully and effectively, especially in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learning. This research is a case study involving ten students selected as the subjects of the study. They will use technology tools such as Movie Maker, to create English digital stories around the themes of campus attractions. Moreover, the participating groups articulate thoughts and ideas on social networking media, Facebook. Data will be collected primarily by means of focus group interviews; observations with the students involved, survey, and documents of students’ learning outcomes. This research study has been implemented to show initial results that most of the students perform well in 21st Century Skills; however, students' EFL learning need to be reinforced. Future suggestions will clarify this important concern to offer conclusion and practical suggestions to EFL educators.