Transforming English Pre-service Teachers Through a Digital Adventure: Developing Digital Literacy and Pedagogical Skills

In response to the growing demand for integrating multimedia learning in the English language classroom, teacher education programmes face the challenge of equipping English pre-service teachers with language, digital, and pedagogical literacies. To foster and enhance their literacy practices, the researchers initiated a digital storytelling (DST) project, seamlessly combining traditional storytelling techniques with multimodal resources to provide an engaging digital adventure. Guided by the framework of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK), a series of activities were designed to stimulate teachers’ content knowledge acquisition and facilitate the transformation of this knowledge into digital and teaching practices. Following reflection on their experiences throughout the three stages of DST implementation, these pre-service teachers reported notable improvements in various aspects of their overall competency, including language and digital literacies, learning motivation, confidence, creativity, critical thinking, and pedagogical skills. As a result of this transformative journey, the pre-service teachers found themselves better equipped to navigate the challenges and opportunities posed by digital learning environments. The outcomes of this research shed light on the potential benefits of utilising DST as a valuable tool for enhancing language teaching and learning, ultimately contributing to the advancement of teacher education in the digital age.