THE IMPLEMENTATION OF DIGITAL STORYTELLING IN TEACHING SPEAKING TO EFL STUDENTS: A CASE STUDY

ABSTRACT Afrilyasanti, Rida. 2009. The Implementation of Digital Storytelling in Teaching Speaking to EFL Students: A Case Study. Thesis, English Department, Faculty of Letters, State University of Malang. Advisor: Prof. Bambang Yudi Cahyono, M.Pd, M.A., Ph.D Key words: digital storytelling, teaching speaking, EFL students. One of the encouraging techniques in teaching speaking is story telling. However, new techniques in applying storytelling still need to be explored in order to make students participate more and be interested in learning speaking. The new techniques used also have to be able to make students produce good stories that can communicate what students actually mean to the audiences well. Modifications of storytelling technique in teaching speaking will be more interactive and encouraging by using multimedia. Briefly stated, digital storytelling is considered to be able to help EFL students to learn speaking. However, the technique is still new in Indonesia and there is no previous study on the use of digital storytelling employed by EFL students in learning speaking. Therefore, this study was intended to describe the implementation of digital storytelling in learning speaking for EFL students. This study is a case study. The subjects of this study were five Junior High School students. The instruments used to collect the data were questionnaires, records of students' participation, researcher's journal, lesson plans, and photographs. All the data gained from all the instruments were collected qualitatively. The researcher then analyzed the data qualitatively, in which the researcher explained the data in detail in descriptive explanation. The next step done by the researcher was describing the findings. All of the data were gathered and analyzed using the criteria for the success of digital storytelling implementation. The criteria were based on the five elements in digital storytelling: the production, the story, students and viewers' understanding, and the influences of digital storytelling on students' speaking skill. The findings of this study were as follows. First, all the five subject students could produce digital storytelling. The digital storytelling production process was not difficult especially because of the storyboarding phase. Storyboard accelerated the digital storytelling production. Second, the students' story shows that they were able to produce communicative and understandable story, that is shown by early planned point of view purpose, coherence plot, communicative images, correct structure of sentences, and correct dictions, eloquent fluency, clear conversational style, and understandable pronunciation. Third, using digital storytelling, the students could understand other friends' story, especially personal recount in English completely because all elements in digital storytelling, that constitute multimedia, helped students to have better understanding on the story. Finally, digital storytelling made students contribute actively and supportively in the speaking activities, especially in the narrating process. Besides, by using digital storytelling students could practice their pronunciation and had ability in using speaking for communicative purpose. Based on the results of the study, teachers are suggested to consider and use digital storytelling as an alternative teaching techniques. When using digital storytelling as a technique of their teaching of speaking, teachers are suggested to manage the time allocations and activities included because digital storytelling in learning speaking is only a teaching technique not the teaching material to be taught. Therefore, the teaching activities should still about language teaching and the times used should be more allocated for the language activities. The schools are suggested to be ready with the facilities needed for the digital storytelling implementation. The facilities that should be prepared for the implementation of digital storytelling are computers with moviemaker program, which are equipped with loudspeakers. At last, other researchers are suggested to use this research as a reference to do classroom action research with a broader sample size of students.