BECOMING STORYTELLERS: IMPROVING ESL STUDENTS' ACADEMIC ENGAGEMENT AND 21ST CENTURY SKILLS THROUGH INTERACTIVE DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Abstract

21 st Century education is rapidly changing due to the emerging of new media technologies that provide easy access to a great amount of information. Accordingly, as today’s students are immersed in a technological society, they need to be equipped with the skills necessary to interpret, synthesize and produce new information. Thus, today’s educators and researchers face the challenge of making students become skillful users of new technologies so to increase their motivation and engagement by also improving their learning outcomes. In particular, in the context of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), using technology appropriately could be a valuable approach to create a meaningful learning context where the acquisition of language and literacy skills is accompanied by that of digital skills. To that end, Digital Storytelling (DST) seems to perfectly embody and meet the various educational needs of today’s students because due to its dynamic feature of combining traditional storytelling with a variety of digital multimedia it provides opportunities for the improvement of learning skills including cooperative learning, motivation, and engagement. In the light of CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning), Collaborative Learning (CL), and the Constructivist Paradigm (CP), this paper aims at addressing the potential of Interactive Digital Storytelling in enhancing ESL (English as a Second Language) students’ academic engagement and 21 st Century Skills. Therefore, this paper describes the implementation of DST at “L’Orientale” University of Naples with 24 ESL students involving qualitative and quantitative methods of collecting data. Results showed that DST enhanced students’ engagement with their studies and the reinforcement of their digital skills.