Improving English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Learners’ ICT Literacy Skills through Digital Storytelling

Year 2017, Volume: 4 Issue: 2, 1 - 9, 01.12.2017

Emrah Ekmekçi

Abstract

Building 21st century literacy skills in every
field of education has become one of the objectives of educational policies in
almost each country. In a broad sense, 21st century skills refer to a set of
knowledge, skills, and characteristics which are believed to be of great
importance for today’s students’ success in the ever-changing technological
environment. There is no doubt that one of these skills which is desired to be
enhanced is Information and Communication Technology Literacy Skill (ICT) of
today’s students. Educators and educational practitioners have been searching
for how to foster students’ ICT literacy skills best so that they can keep up
with the recent developments. In this context, EFL learners’ ICT literacy
skills need to be improved as they will encounter digital natives when they
start teaching. One of the effective ways of fostering ICT literacy skill is to
utilize digital storytelling in foreign language classes. Because digital
storytelling combines multiple modes of technology such as photographs, music,
movie maker and recording tools, video clips, text, audio narration, and etc. to
produce successful stories, EFL learners need be competent enough to be able to
use these tools effectively. Digital stories enable learners to produce oral,
written, and visual messages and to interact with others. The present study
attempts to highlight the possible benefits of digital storytelling and
indicate how students’ projects as to digital stories help them to improve
their ICT literacy skills. To this end, prospective English language teachers’
projects on creating digital stories were examined within the scope of
computer-assisted language learning (CALL) course which was offered as an
elective course for senior students in the spring term of 2015-2016 academic
year at the department of English Language Teacher Education (ELT). Analyses of
the projects prepared by the students show that students’ ICT skills can be
considered to be highly satisfying in terms of incorporating different
technological materials into a single story. It can be concluded that being one
of the most important 21st century skills, ICT literacy skill can be enhanced
through preparing digital stories to a great extent.

Keywords

digital storytelling, ict skills, technology, language teaching

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