THE POWER OF STORY: USING PERSONAL NARRATIVE, COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY AND PODCASTING WITH YOUNG ADULT ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS

One way to ensure a high quality, personalized literacy program for English language learners is to use the learners’ own lives and experiences as curriculum. Creating spaces for students to compose and share stories results in a strong sense of community facilitates the development of authentic literacy skills and increases student motivation and achievement. Present day, multimedia, networked computers provide a range of informational communicative and publishing tools that can be used to dissolve classroom walls, bringing the students out and the world inside. Moreover, students who work on projects using computers demonstrate increased cooperation and collaboration. For this project, young adult learners from diverse cultures, studying English as a second or other language at a community college made use of computer technology to compose personal narratives and share them with others. Results indicate that using student stories as texts and sharing those texts via podcasting enhances literacy skills, increases student confidence and selfefficacy, and inspires them to work for the common good. The study involved only two small classes of multicultural students, but the strong success of the project suggests using students’ life stories as curriculum and computer technology as a means of sharing is a powerful model of instruction.