Digital storytelling to facilitate academic public speaking skills: case study in culturally diverse multilingual classroom

A small scale study is reported in the article in an effort to determine the impact of enhancing cultural diversity in teaching academic public speaking skills as a result of Digital Storytelling (DS) implementation in multilingual classrooms of 2nd year TEFL pre-service students who took training over 7 weeks to become teachers of English as a foreign language. DS represents a powerful way of making/telling short stories using animation, website, audio video, and graphics. We explored DS in the English Language Classroom for TEFL pre-service students for developing public speaking skills because DS improves vocabulary enrichment and oral skills. Teachers also access students’ English language fluency, coherence, and cohesion to identify areas of academic public speaking skills improvement for their multilingual students. The experimental teaching had several stages, namely the introductory phase when students were supposed to decide on the topic of their stories and make initial drafts. The second phase was dedicated to the verification of the final draft by a tutor. During the last phase of the project, students performed their own DS with public presentations. The study used mixed research methods, i.e. both qualitative (focus group) and quantitative (questionnaires and rubrics) methods. Students used devices with digital capabilities to record narrations so their created DS included their personally produced public speech. Our results demonstrated that DS provided an opportunity to make students’ speech more coherent and cohesive because points of descriptors such as fluency, coherence, and cohesion of academic public speaking performances significantly improved by 15%. Moreover, this technique depicted a positive outcome because of its constant reiteration of academic vocabulary and grammar in multilingual groups, and cultural diversity in different nations.