Digital stories to teach english to young learners: Prospective elt teachers’ beliefs, attitudes and experiences

Abstract

Equipping prospective teachers (PTs) of young English learners with a variety of child-appropriate materials and techniques is very prominent. Digital Stories (DSs) with their multimodal features enable teachers to meet the needs of 21^st century digital native students when learning a foreign language. Thus, the study aims to investigate the beliefs, attitudes and experiences of 75 prospective English teachers of Uludag University ELT department about the creation and using child-appropriate digital stories to teach English to young learners (YLs). The data were collected through a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire with 26 items and the Cronbach alpha of the items was.87. In addition, a semi-structured interview was conducted with 10 participants to delve into the results obtained from the questionnaire. The descriptive analysis of the questionnaire revealed that nearly all of the participants agreed that digital stories should be used to take children’s attention easily, better learn a foreign language, increase YLs’ motivation, change the dynamics of the traditional classrooms, and keep YLs’ attention throughout the lesson. However, based on their own experience in creating a child-appropriate digital story, nearly half of them reported that it was not easy to create an effective DS without being educated.