From Storytelling to the Voice Story App: A Research Translation Project

Abstract

Many existing language tasks are suitable for a specific language level or contain language that is specific to a particular topic or a particular language or culture, so do not suit all students’ levels or account for the language that students know. ‘Storytelling’ however, is an open-ended task that involves the oral telling of stories constructed with pictures. Students create stories using the language that they know and tell stories about anything that they are interested in. It can be used with all languages at all language levels and provides a platform for students to showcase their language skills. Although very successful in eliciting language from students, it relies on a heavy workload for teachers in preparing large numbers of pictures. The idea to remove the heavy resource development load from teachers, and make the Storytelling elicitation task scalable with a ‘Voice Story’ app then evolved. A successful pitch for university Research Translation funding enabled the translation of the physical language elicitation task into an app. The Voice Story app contains categories of pictures and enables photo taking. Students select the pictures and photos that they want by dragging them to the screen and then voice record their story. The ability to save and share the stories makes this app particularly relevant for oral language assessment data in second language teaching and learning contexts. This session explains the process from Storytelling to the creation of the Voice Story app and shares examples of each.



Author Information
Naomi Wilks-Smith, RMIT University, Australia

Paper Information
Conference: ACLL2018
Stream: Mobile learning / Apps

This paper is part of the ACLL2018 Conference Proceedings (View)
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Posted by James Alexander Gordon