In this study, learners’ engagement and learners’ understanding were considered as two educational issues which mainly affected the implementation of Digital Stories project in listening comprehension.
Learners’ engagement
As mentioned above, the participants were of the same English level: A2, all of them were willing to give any responses to the learning method. However, they only needed grade 5.0 to enter this class, so it was noticeable that students with higher grades (7-8) seemed to quickly engage in listening project with their enthusiasm. The researcher has to remind that all the participants took part in the Digital Stories project should apply their own strategies to practice listening skills.
Five participants were chosen randomly in order to investigate the differences among students‟ attitudes towards the innovation. They were coded as student 1, 5, 13, 17 and 26. First and foremost, question related to previous experiences of learning English was raised in each group. It was obviously that teacher really needed to find out how students felt about their learning experiences as well as the control between the previous methods and using Digital Stories to learn listening. Student 1 and 17 in the stronger group indicated that they tried to gain knowledge from various sources such as: text books at high school, lectures from university teachers and online materials. Besides, they admitted that watching movies and listening to music in English were other methods encouraging them to improve listening skills. By contrast, the other group showed that they only learn listening skill by focusing on what they were taught at school as well as university.
Without textbooks, they hardly ever found different available materials to study out of the classroom because of “lack of time” (Student 5) or “not interested in online learning” (Student 13).
After eight-week implementing Digital Stories learning project, participants were asked about their perspectives on the innovation. While students in stronger group could clarify their opinions related to what they thought about using Digital Stories in listening comprehension, the members from the weaker group provided quite vague answers. For example, Student 1 eagerly described the innovation as:
“an interesting method of learning”, “an up-to-date method”, “suitable to dynamic person like [him] ”, “encourages [him] to listen more and more”. However, all of them considered language improvement as one of the biggest advantage of Digital Stories learning project. They also indicated that Digital Stories were a diverse source of materials which gave them chances to learn listening comprehension skill actively. In the past, they barely learned listening skills by listening recordings from textbooks without watching any Digital Stories while achieving this skill. “The lessons become more and more visual because I not only have opportunity to listen to recordings, but also guess any new words with pictures appeared in Digital Stories” (Student 26). This innovation turned out to be an amazing language learning methodology. Convenience was also reviewed as another strong point of Digital Stories. According to them, videos were easy to connect and store in any electronic devices in order to listen to “at any time”. Moreover, watching Digital Stories was “not limited by time and place”. Student 26 also said that “I never feel bored when trying new learning method which suits my interest”.
However, they also pointed out some limitations. The first one was related to the presence of new vocabulary items. Some Digital Stories contained a large number of new words but sooner or later they were provided by teachers. Although these words seem to be familiar to students to some extent, they still need to be learnt by heart by learners. While some “use dictionary all the time”, other participants did not fully pay attention on those Digital Stories‟ content and
sometimes induce them to the thought of giving up. At last, they said that
“understanding the whole video is time-consuming, but I think it’s not a big problem”. Although participants had already got an orientation before starting project, some were still vague and not sure what to do. This needed much more teacher‟s instructions. Their further explanation was that without checking or evaluation from instructor, they hardly ever caught up with the project during class.
As Student 17 mentioned, “it is essential for teachers to create more incentives for listening comprehension so that benefits of project could be enhanced”. Last but not least, the accent and speaking speed of speakers were real challenges for students. It was essential for them to listen to the Digital Stories several times so as to catch key words because of their exotic voice and fast speed.
From individual interviews, researcher could achieve more insights into the effectiveness of this learning method thanks to participants‟ control between Digital Stories and their previous methods. It was noticeable that even weaker students who were not sure about their listening improvement, still approved the value of Digital Stories listening comprehension. They asserted that Digital Stories made their comprehensive listening lessons easier than doing exercises in textbook. However, they also admitted that it would take time to make a significant change. Meanwhile, students from group clarified their opinions as following: “In spite of some disadvantages, I think I like this method”, “This is useful for me because I want to learn listening through visualizing videos”, “and Digital Stories is an up-to-date learning method”(Student 5, 13, 26).Based on what they personally expressed, researcher could recognize that they seemed to be engaged, more or less, in Digital Stories learning method, which developed their appreciation for learning listening this way.
Nonetheless, it was difficult to realize how well students participated in Digital Stories learning from the diaries. They were asked to write a 100-word diary answering the question why Digital Stories project worked for them. Some students stated that this method worked because they loved listening to English music and
watching American action movies. Once again, all participants preferred this method rather than the traditional one because of having chances to learning listening skills actively. Learning listening with pictures really guided them to acquire knowledge effectively. Unfortunately, students from weaker group could not write enough 100 words in their diary since they did not know how to produce what they were thinking into written form.
Learners’ understanding
In fact, raising questions related to participants‟ problems during the project in front of their classmates was not a sensible way. Therefore, another way probing students‟ opinions indirectly was inviting them to do individual interviews. The main question here was:What would have made Digital Storiesproject better? Why?
Since all the participants had their personal computers as well as portable electronics devices such as:ipod, ipad, mp3 player, etc. they claimed the innovation was relevant and convenient nowadays since they could store any Digital stories in their personal devices. However, they also suggested that the number of Digital Stories should be provided more in order that they could focus more time on listening lessons in the class: “If I watched Digital Stories more often, I could remember as well as understand the lesson easily” (Students 1, 26), “two or three Digital Stories per week would be perfect because I can have time to look up and remember new words” (Student 13). Students‟ suggestions revealed that the participants still got into trouble during the project but they understood how important this method was to their own learning strategy. Besides, they also tried to find out solutions to this problem.
Weaker group members confessed that sometimes they could not fully understand the Digital Stories without help from teacher. Although they read the subtitles as well as looked up new words in the dictionary, they found difficult to comprehend the whole Digital Stories. One weaker student said that he knew that these topics provided in their textbook but he still needed to try his best to catch some main ideas(Student 5). That is a good example for students‟ self-
understanding, they really knew what they were doing and especially, they believed that it was effective in their learning. Furthermore, all students in this group agreed to join in longer discussion so that they had opportunity to exchange ideas with other classmates as well as with teacher. From all the evidences above, it could be assumed that despite realizing the effectiveness of Digital Stories project, weaker students still had difficulties in understanding the content of Digital Stories. They did not suggest any learning strategies or improvement methods for listening comprehension, what they mentioned was the need for teacher‟s and classmates‟
supports, which to some extent showed their lack of self-confidence. Meanwhile, stronger ones (Students 1, 17) seem to be very interested in this new learning approach.
Moreover, information from students‟ diary could shed light onhow effective Digital stories brought into. They not only described what they did in the project every two weeks, but also pointed out whether they worked or not. Good student 1 who had listening habit wrote that “I replayed Digital Stories whenever I had free time. I still felt very excited when I started this new project”. This revealed the fact that student really had enjoyable experience with the method. From other student‟s opinion in group, Student 13 could “use some expressions in Digital Stories to communicate in real-life situation”, “achieve some specialized words in their own textbooks”. Another high level student gave some positive comments on listening comprehension: “when I watched Digital Stories, some new words appeared on the screen. If I didn’t understand, there also were some pictures shown in order to give me clues to find out the meanings of these words. Then I feel very excited to listen and remember more words” (Student 5). In general, there was a correlation between participants‟ preferred topics and the extent they comprehend Digital Stories.
However, some students got into trouble with this new learning method.
Apart from time constraints or having too much homework, Student 5 assumed that
“It sometimes didn’t work because I just listened and didn’t pay attention. I almost forgot right after leaving school”. He thought a more serious way should be applied
to force them to really listening to Digital Stories comprehensively. Besides, according to student 5, more problems about understanding were encountered.
Listening learning tended to be ineffective because they admitted that “Although I listened these words before, I didn’t remember”(Student 26), “I sometimes felt overloaded with new information as well as vocabulary, I think I need more teacher’s support” (Student 13).
From data collected in the study, it was revealed that Digital Stories listening project was effective, in terms of student satisfaction. There may be some underlying reasons for digital stories being effective for developing listening skills.
Before the project it was observed that the students tended to be bored during the listening activities and the students in the experimental group stated they did not like listening activities. However, with the use of digital stories, they stated that they enjoyed the lessons and became engaged in the activities. Besides, the teacher in the experimental group claimed that those who did not use to join in the activities began to participate willingly, and turned out to be more and more interested in digital stories and the listening activities. Most of the students as well as the teacher pointed out that the use of digital stories created an engaging and motivating classroom, which also led the students develop positive attitudes towards listening lessons and activities. Therefore, it can be put forward that the engaging and motivating atmosphere thanks to the use of digital stories, which are quite different from what the students were used to could also be an important positive factor for the development of listening skills. As Yu ksel (2011) pointed out, thanks to digital stories and activities, the willingness of students and their participation show an increase as the classroom atmosphere changes.
In a nutshell, this study shows that student watching of the digital stories, instead of only listening, is an important factor in helping the development of the listening skills. As listening activities accompanied by watching could be more influential, listening texts in language arts course books could be supported by multimedia. Teachers could use and/or produce digital stories instead of using
traditional CDs which do not include any visuals, or instead of reading the listening texts aloud.
Although students generally satisfied with this method, they still faced to some obstacles and frustrations during 8-week learning process. Specifically, they mainly experienced the frustration with digital stories delivered at a rapid speech rate. In fact, these digital stories were designed unscripted with authentic materials, focused mainly on native audiences. In order to alleviate the problem, it is necessary for teacher to think about learner training in metacognitive strategies. A variety of common teaching strategies might be implemented in the listening sessions such as activating background knowledge, note-taking or checking meaning later. However, a more structured approach should be adopted in later study.
3.2. Data collected from listening tests