Digital storytelling for EFL preschool classroom: tools, activities and themes proposed by preservice teachers

Abstract

The storytelling practice, in general, and the digital storytelling (DS), in particular, entail many advantages for young pupils in the educative context. The main aim of this paper was to examine the tools, the type of activities, and the themes of the stories devoted to preschool pupils. Preservice preschool teachers were asked to choose tools to create their genuine story materials and to design an activity for a specific target age of preschool education to go with them. A total of 136 preservice teachers’ tasks were analysed for this study. The results showed that the most frequent tool type in the three target age (3, 4, and 5 years old) was the one allowing the integration of Dialogues in the stories; the most popular activity type was Reading comprehension for 4- and 5-year-olds, and Images (match or order) for 3-year-olds; and the most recurrent theme was Animal and pets for 4- and 5-year-olds and Friendship for 3-year-olds. This type of study is essential to train preservice teachers both digitally and methodologically for today's school.