DIGITAL STORYTELLING AS A TOOL FOR SOCIO-EMOTIONAL COMPETENCIES DEVELOPMENT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

Abstract

The modern educational environment actively integrates social-emotional learning (SEL) to promote social adaptation, ethical culture, and emotional development of students. This article considers the method of digital storytelling as a tool for the formation of social-emotional competencies of students during English classes. The article examines social-emotional competencies, known as CASEL5, which are self-awareness, self-management, relationship skills, responsible decision-making, and social awareness. At the same time, the analysis of the standards for basic and full general secondary education in Ukraine (2011 and 2020) proved the productivity of the linguistic and literary educational field in the integration of social-emotional learning, where the use of the storytelling method, in particular digital, enables the formation of key social-emotional competencies of students. The method of digital storytelling is implemented through various online platforms and related tasks. For example, creating comics appears as a visualization of complex stories, which helps students improve not only SEL competencies but also foreign language communicative competence, creativity, and digital literacy. This goal is also facilitated by the use of online cubes for storytelling, and emojis. The article also highlights AI-enabled online books as a tool for social-emotional learning. The Storybooks platform generates online books at the user's request. The generated stories are aligned with social-emotional learning themes and end with questions that stimulate discussion among students, thus encouraging them to think critically and reflect. The study found that digital storytelling serves as a powerful channel for students to express emotions, empathy, improve their ethical skills and social responsibility. This method develops a constructive dialogue, the articulation of thoughts and beliefs, as well as the visualization of universal values and life experience, and thus contributes to the holistic development of students’ socio-emotional competencies.