Abstract:
A small scale study is reported in the article in an efort 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 fuency, 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 verifcation of the fnal 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 fuency, coherence, and cohesion of academic public speaking
performances signifcantly 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 diferent nations.
