Engaging young learners of English with digital stories: Learning to mean

Abstract

Using a digital story to teach English to pupils in primary schools is not a new enterprise in the field of TESOL. However, this learning platform remains under-practiced in Asian primary schools where English is socio-politically viewed as a foreign language. To fill this gap, we implemented digital storytelling (DST) to engage children in the creation of digital stories and in learning to mean in a multimodal way. This article specifically describes our experience of using DST as pedagogical innovation with pupils of 10-12 years old. In this DST project, pupils jointly created digital stories as multimodal texts. In this respect, they utilized different linguistic resources (e.g., Javanese, Bahasa Indonesia, and English) as well as visual and technological affordances, which assisted them in voicing their real-life experience through digital stories. The practical implication of the project is that primary school teachers of English can experiment with DST to engage pupils in meaningful project-based language learning.

A Development Design of Digital Story Conceptual Change-Oriented in Physics Subject

“…The analysis of bad responses for two of them (contextual problem and problem solutions indicators) that student overall less concentrate to observe the information that deliver by DSCC display. The consequences of this problem was student unable to give an accurate feedback for their teacher about their observation digital stories [18].…”

The Profile of Primary English Teachers in Indonesia

“…Following the global mainstream, Indonesian EYL practice dated back in the 1980s in which a study reporting parents' strong belief on the needs of children to study English and the unsatisfactory results of the secondary schoolers' English proficiency (Lestari, 2003) led to thoughts to bring English to primary schools. English was introduced to primary school curriculum through Presidential Decree Number 28 Year 1990, (Kirkpatrick & Liddicoat, 2017) which later elevated to become local content subject by the issuing of the Decree of Ministry of Education and Culture Number 060 Year 1993, (Alwasilah, 2013;Hawanti, 2014;Iskandar, 2015;Zein, 2017).…”

“…As there was intense pressure from parents who did not want their kids to be left behind in learning English, most primary schools decided to have English (Zein, 2014(Zein, & 2015Lestari 2003;Hawanti, 2014) as their local content subject. The policy led to a dilemma as it resulted in primary schools rushing to offer English to pupils without considering whether or not they were ready with it.…”

“…The policy led to a dilemma as it resulted in primary schools rushing to offer English to pupils without considering whether or not they were ready with it. There were reports of poor classroom performance by underqualified teachers (Zein, 2011(Zein, , 2014(Zein, & 2015Lestari, 2003;Hawanti, 2014). The poor classroom practices might also root from the non-relevant teachers' qualification as a study conducted by Alwasilah (2013) among the primary English teachers, revealed that about 58% of primary English teachers in the provinces of Jakarta, West Java, and Banten had neither English background nor a proper TEYL training.…”

“…Zein (2015) points that teachers lacked spelling accuracy, had poor pronunciation (Suyanto and Chodidjah, 2002) and fluency (Chodidjah, 2007), and dealt with difficulties in terms of classroom management (Sikki, Rahman, Hamra, & Noni, 2013). Further studies reported that the poor quality of primary English was not rooted only from teachers' poor performance but also from budget shortage leading to lack of teaching resources (Hawanti, 2014) and facilities to support learning (Faridi, 2010;Lestari, 2003;Sulistiyo, et.al., 2019). It shows that the policy was not thoroughly prepared which led to a somewhat hasty decision when implemented.…”