Abstract

The world of technology has had a significant impact on the development of education. One of these powerful technologies used in education is digital storytelling which integrates computer technologies and telling stories together. By combining texts, images, and audios, DST becomes a powerful multimedia tool in the domain of language teaching and learning where teachers can enhance their teaching creativity and students are encouraged to actively involve in their learning process to improve their speaking skills and tell stories in their own words and voice. While much research has emphasized the effectiveness of digital storytelling in motivation and listening anxiety, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of digital storytelling on learning motivation and reducing anxiety of learners to talk to others in a foreign language. Our intervention group participants were taught online by the researcher and they met regularly for two sessions of one hour and a half per week. The online course lasted 10 sessions including the final test session. The course took about a month with 15 hours of teaching in total. At the beginning, students had to take pre-test to identify their speaking motivation and anxiety before digital storytelling (DST) intervention. Afterwards, the post-test was used to compare for finding out how different students’ anxiety and motivation were before and after digital storytelling (DST) intervention.
The findings of the present study based on pre-tests and post-tests in the form of questionnaires support that digital storytelling (DST) reduces anxiety for English foreign language speakers to talk to others, but DST intervention does not affect the motivation of English foreign language speakers to talk to others.
Keywords: digital storytelling, speaking anxiety, speaking motivation, teaching speaking, computer technologies