Digital Storytelling vs Traditional Storytelling: Teaching English Language to ANHS Students

According to a study published by Crystal & Graddol (1997), English is the most common and utilized language in the world. Regarded as the lingua franca, it is seen in social media, academic texts, novels, television, and more. Due to its omnipresence, it is paramount that every citizen must at least have a decent grasp of the language. However, as stated and shown in the Senate Resolution No. 622 filed by Senator Grace Poe (2018), English proficiency has been on a steady decline (p. 2). Instead of combating this using traditional teaching methods, this paper proposes that teachers instead use the storytelling approach. Studies have shown that stories, when it is aligned with one's interests, have a profound effect on a person's ability to understand the language (Gonzales, 2009, p. 105). This paper will focus on determining which type of storytelling will be more effective in teaching English: traditional or digital. Traditional storytelling is the storyteller-listener approach, while digital storytelling is storytelling using computer-based tools. These two types of storytelling were used to test the English proficiency of 2 different sections from the Adult Night High School (ANHS) students of La Salle Green Hills. Using a pre-test borrowed from the Word-Up project, the researchers were able to assess their initial English proficiency level. Afterwards, the students were asked to read the story 'The Monkey's Paw' by W.W Jacobs, one through traditional reading and the other through PowerPoint presentation. The students were then given a post-test made by the researchers themselves to see if they improved, and if one class scored higher than the other. Using T-Test: Two-Sample Assuming Unequal Variances with a 95% level of confidence, the statistical computations show that there is little to no statistical difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of traditional storytelling class and the digital storytelling class. Hence, researchers have failed to reject the null hypothesis, which means that there is little to no significant difference between the effectiveness of digital storytelling and the effectiveness of traditional storytelling. However, this could be attributed to the limitations of the study. Therefore, more research must be done in order to come to a more conclusive result.