Facilitating Children’s Oracy Skills Through Digital Storytelling

Digital storytelling is applied in a range of educational settings, from kindergarten to college. Throughout the digital storytelling process, spoken language serves as a medium for generating new ideas and knowledge, establishing oracy as a crucial tool for thinking and learning in young children. Beyond biological factors, the development of oracy is influenced by verbal interactions with children’s environment. Previous research has emphasized the significance of dialogic teaching in actively engaging children, improving their critical and creative thinking abilities, and cultivating their independence as learners with self-awareness and metacognitive skills. A vital thinking skill for children in the 21st century is computational thinking (CT), which involves recognizing problems, dissecting them, and formulating solutions in a way that is understandable to both humans and machines. We propose that integrating digital storytelling can enhance both children’s oracy and CT skills, allowing these skills to support one another. This chapter introduces an application of digital storytelling as a pedagogical approach to bolster L2 children’s oracy and CT skills. We organized a one-day workshop titled “1, 2, 3 Action! Digital Storytelling through Drama,” with twelve children (ages 5–6) who were learning English as a second language. Throughout the workshop, we recorded the children’s dialogues and performances, noting their use of oracy skills during drama activities as they collaborated on narratives and scripts, participated in role-playing, and improvised. This chapter aims to enrich the existing literature on how digital storytelling can promote the oracy development and CT skills of young learners.