Digital Storytelling for English Teaching at Alam Nurul Islam Integrated Islamic Junior High School Yogyakarta

Abstract

Digital storytelling has been utilized in teaching and learning activities within EFL classrooms. Although the implementation of activities involving digital storytelling poses challenges, both teachers and students have derived benefits from such activities. This research has the objective to investigate how teachers implement digital storytelling in the classroom and the challenges encountered when utilizing digital storytelling to teach English. Employing a qualitative descriptive method, the research was conducted at Alam Nurul Islam Integrated Islamic Junior High School in Yogyakarta, involving two English teachers as participants. The researcher employed interviews to gather the data. The outcomes revealed that when integrating digital storytelling into English teaching, the teachers implemented three phases, namely the preparatory stage, teaching activity, and feedback session. During the preparatory stage, three activities were undertaken, including preparing materials, organizing equipment, compiling videos, and uploading videos. In the teaching activity stage, seven activities were carried out, namely brainstorming, presenting videos, identifying challenging vocabulary, facilitating group discussions, elucidating the video’s meaning, narrating stories by students, and uploading student video assignments. During the feedback session, three activities took place: commenting on videos, asking and answering questions, and providing feedback and assessment. Meanwhile, the challenges faced by teachers in implementing digital storytelling included a lack of skills in using devices and applications, difficulty in searching for content, a shortage of teachers’ creativity, and challenges in understanding students. The implication is that teachers can utilize these three steps to teach digital storytelling and devise solutions for overcoming obstacles.