Summary of "Developing automatic learning for oral proficiency using digital storytelling"

With the development of online educational technology, there are many ways to develop English learners’ autonomy through self-access learning. But this paper mainly investigates how their own independent learning, assessments, and feedback can help foster learners’ autonomy and how ESL learners can develop their self-assessment skills and how the teacher’s role can shift to facilitators or guide when self-study resources are used in autonomous learning by a learner-centered task( storytelling after watching the silent movie clips ---recording it by using a combination of communication tools, Vocaroo, vozMe, and VoiceThread---emailed it to instructors to get the feedback and guidance of discourse, pronunciation, vocabulary and sentence complexity). Then the participants experienced four stages: first concrete experience stage, second reflective observation stage, third abstract conceptualization stage, final stage of testing in new situations, and though this cycle, participants’ oral proficiency has the potential to gradually develop by repeating this learning process while going through each of the four assessment(storytelling and three questionnaires). Finally, the results revealed significant improvement in all participants’ overall proficiency in terms of vocabulary, sentence complexity and pronunciation, but there was no significant improvement in discourse and grammar, because no feedback on grammar was given by the instructors, which showed that instructor feedback is important in improving their speaking skills, even in autonomous learning. In conclusion, the research paper supported the infinite tlearning opportunity without time and space constraints can help to improve English oral proficiency by using online self-study programs for high-intermediate and advanced ESL learners as well as the importance of the instructors’ feedback, role and materials.