Teacher's behaviour in integrating Digital Storytelling (DST) software into their language teaching : its impact & implications

Abstract

“The incorporation of digital and new media technologies into the university classroom is clearly underway and will become of signal importance to the way students learn and teachers teach in the twenty-first century” (Clarke & Adam, 2010, p.173). To investigate the teachers' roles in using new technologies in their classes, this pilot study made use of semi-structured interviews with six individual English language instructors of an undergraduate freshman remedial English course at a university in Hong Kong. After applying the Levels of Use (LoU) interview protocol developed by Hall and Hord (2011), the indicative results possibly showed a direct relationship between each teacher’s behaviour(s) and the integration of Digital Storytelling (DST) software into his/her classroom. The teacher’s underlying pedagogical belief(s) and their perceptions of their students’ digital capability were important determinants to the teachers' behaviours. The LoU user type results obtained also provided certain insights into appropriate strategies that may be implemented by course management to promote better DST software integration into ESL classrooms. This research also suggests that the role of teacher’s behaviour(s) could be important in integrating DST into the classroom. It is suggested that conducting a follow-up study with a larger sample size, and further investigation into suitable facilitation methods by course management for the successful DST integration/implementation in higher education is necessary to verify these pilot findings.