Integrating Value Education into Digital Storytelling (DST): Evidence from a Hong Kong Primary School

With the aim to enhance positive psychology and character strengths in primary students, this pilot study employed seven digital storytelling media embedding seven unique character strengths, namely mindfulness, hope and bravery, self-appreciation & uniqueness, teamwork, courage, judgement, and perspective, among seven classes ranging from P3 to P6 of a primary school. pre-surveys and-post surveys assessing character strength were completed by students. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with the responsible in-service English teachers to know their observations of students learning and their opinions on DST teaching. Based on the feedback of the primary pupils and the in-service teachers, the DST videos and teaching activities increased students’ interest in reading English stories and provided a valuable opportunity for them to explore and reflect on personal strengths and weaknesses. In addition, our project also inspired the in-service teachers at this primary school to proactively adopt digital storytelling to facilitate students’ contextualized language acquisition and complex content understanding, such as grammatical rules and story structures. Theoretical and pedagogical implications are discussed in this paper.