EXAMINING UNDERGRADUATE EFL STUDENTS’ WRITING SKILLS AND CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT THROUGH DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Abstract

Recent studies highlight that digital storytelling can develop EFL students’ linguistic and cultural repertoire. The students’ involvement in a series of activities in composing the digital stories has also been shown to instil certain character values, such as autonomy and creativity. However, the ways digital storytelling can facilitate literacy and character development among university students not majoring in English Language Teaching (ELT) are not sufficiently known. This study examines the writing skills and character development of 36 undergraduate EFL students majoring in Korean Language Education in Indonesia. A qualitative research approach was employed. The students’ revised story scripts were analysed using textual analysis to identify their writing skills development in three aspects: format and content, organisation and coherence, and sentence construction and vocabulary. Meanwhile, their character development was examined from the interview transcripts and reflection sheets through thematic analysis. The results showed that students demonstrated writing skills development in composing effective, grammatically correct sentences and incorporating more details into the story. Only a few students were concerned with organisation and coherence, which might be due to the predetermined structure of the story given by the teacher. Further, the process of scriptwriting and creating the digital story offers valuable opportunities to foster 12 of the 18-character values mandated by the Indonesian government, with a strong emphasis on autonomy and creativity. The findings extend the affordance of digital storytelling in developing writing literacy and character values from the experience of EFL and non-ELT students in a higher education context.