LLT Journal, e-ISSN 2579-9533, p-ISSN 1410-7201, Vol. 25, No. 2, October 2022, pp. 497-504 LLT Journal: A Journal on Language and Language Learning http://e-journal.usd.ac.id/index.php/LLT Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia 497 STORYBOARDING: A MODEL TECHNIQUE FOR THE LANGUAGE LEARNING PROCESS *Rizwana Wahid1 and Ahtisham Aziz2 1King Khalid University, Saudi Arabia 2Aligarh College of Education, Agra University, India rizuwahid@gmail.com1 and adi4usmailbox@gmail.com2 *correspondence: rizuwahid@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.24071/llt.v25i2.4253 received 21 January 2022; accepted 3 October 2022 Abstract The current paper mainly focuses on three objectives: introduces the concept of storyboard teaching, highlights its usefulness in higher education as a variant in online and offline courses or as an adapting teaching materials tool according to the learners’ needs and context of learning, and then recommends its use in the classroom, especially in language and literature, mixed with other innovative teaching techniques. Moreover, the current paper focuses on how storyboarding provides platforms for the students to be active, creative, and critical thinkers and learning is not limited to only remembering while they analyze their works, reflect, and progress. The researchers have highly recommended incorporating the storyboarding technique in higher education classrooms and fusing it with other innovative techniques to make a classroom interesting, engaging, and interactive. Adding the storyboarding approach, students get motivated and feel confident and competent after the completion of mapping out their ideas visually, cognitively, and creatively. Keywords: approach, creativity, critical thinking, learning, storyboarding Introduction To be successful, teachers must impart their lectures successfully and authentically connected to real-life situations and adapt teaching methods according to learners’ needs. Storyboarding is one of the techniques which assists instructors in the conveyance of their ideas visually and engages learners in active and authentic learning. In the present scenario, to make teaching authentic and engaging, soft skills/real-life skills are undoubtedly an essential prerequisite to teaching. Education cannot be restricted to a singular teaching approach as one size does not fit all. Similarly, efficient educators practice plural teaching methods and approach in the classrooms, and storyboarding can add pluralism to their instructions along with other various instructional techniques. Knauf and Jantke (2006) overview the teaching through a storyboard consisting of further structured episodes and scenes similar to a traditional story on shows, plays, and movies. The materials for storyboarding are slides, textbooks, scripts, and models, for example. mailto:rizuwahid@gmail.com mailto:adi4usmailbox@gmail.com mailto:rizuwahid@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.24071/llt.v25i2.4253 LLT Journal, e-ISSN 2579-9533, p-ISSN 1410-7201, Vol. 25, No. 2, October 2022, pp. 497-504 498 Storyboarding displays the visual maps of any project planning and involves learners in creative and critical thinking (Yusoff & Salim, 2014; Walker et al., 2015). Students work as a team and narrate their ideas through pictures. Denison (1995) defines storyboarding as “a cooperative learning technique for teaching and learning organizational skills in the field of education, and for planning educational programs of every conceivable magnitude” (p. 2). Furthermore, it is very useful to stimulate active learning because teachers form a group/team of some students who think about the plan creatively and visualize images and every participant offers his/her ideas. Then the creative learning session is followed by a critical thinking session. The ideas are scrutinized minutely by the team and the accepted ideas are mapped out visually. It helps the team to rearrange and organize their ideas. One storyboarding module generates a variety of creative ideas while stimulating the active learning, creativity and of each team member (Jantke & Knauf, 2005; Patton, 2012). According to Varvel and Lindeman (2005), “storyboards are a means to graphically represent layout, organization, content, and linkages of information to create a conceptual idea of the information, location, meaning, and appearance (p.1). Online and offline/on-campus classes are mostly teacher-centered and traditional. However, some teachers are constructivist, they evaluate their teaching approaches and adapt their styles to meet the learners’ needs and growth. Storyboarding is one of the tools/techniques which can help teachers fulfill their teaching goals as it makes the classroom interesting, engaging, reflective, and assists students to grow. At the same time, it also develops teamwork, responsibility, creativity, and critical thinking ability among university students. Therefore, the researchers emphasize the use of storyboarding as a model approach for certain modules to reflect, process, and assess learners’ learning progress, and performance and to achieve the learning outcomes. It is a powerful tool to develop collaborative learning. This research paper intends to highlight the following objectives. 1. The necessity to adapt different variants to handle offline and online learning challenges, 2. Emphasis on the importance of storyboarding in representing teaching materials, engaging learners, eliciting and assessing their performance, and improving their overall learning easily and interestingly, and 3. Ways the storyboard helps organize instructors’ ideas subtly by visually mapping out the teaching modules. Theory There is a lot of research available on the use of storyboards in different disciplines like medicine, finance, computer science, etc. However, in arts and humanities, less work is found than in other disciplines. Storyboarding is one of the most common methods to make students active, creative, communicative, innovative, and critical thinkers. Barrows (2001) views it as facilitating the students in constructing flexible knowledge, real-life skills, self-directed learning, responsibility, real collaboration skills, and inherent motivation for learning activities. Moreover, Fried-Booth (2002) calls the storyboard a modern and practical approach that can be employed to plan and create learning development processes for learners at different stages of learning. Similarly, Moursund (2003) LLT Journal, e-ISSN 2579-9533, p-ISSN 1410-7201, Vol. 25, No. 2, October 2022, pp. 497-504 499 states that it plays a proactive role in building vital learning skills such as collaborative skills, analytical thinking, innovative thinking, accountability, and communication. Therefore, a storyboard is a practical method in the teaching and learning process. Furthermore, it can be stated that storyboard teaching can also be employed for teaching specific skills i.e., speaking, writing, reading, and other problem- solving skills (Dirckinck-Holmfeld, 2010). As Doherty and Coggeshall (2005) explain that a storyboard is a platform where students reflect their learning output by retelling the story of input comprehension through words and images. Dupen (2005) also advocates the application of storyboarding approach to problem-solving in his Statics and Strength of Materials classes. In his study, he teaches problem- solving techniques and then, distributes a series of handouts consisting of images in a sequence to facilitate the students solving of multi-dimensional problems. Each handout includes a shadow of the previous image and by looking at the shadow, the learners could visualize the problem-solving sequence and perform the task easily. Theory Application Therefore, instructors can use storyboards as one of the learning tools in teaching processes. Knauf and Jantke (2006) see that instruction sometimes lacks didactic skills. The concept of storyboard clarifies didactic skills by visualization process. It can be inferred based on the aforementioned studies that a storyboard is a tool that facilitates learners by mapping out visually their story in a series, to think analytically, critically, and creatively. This technique leads students to brainstorm their narratives and show their stories from the beginning to the end. Moreover, they supply the words or phrases in each drawing/image for illustrations. Then they can frame the final draft of the storyboard. According to Andersson, Obery, and Eriksson (2011), the storyboard is a powerful tool to develop creativity especially it improves new project creations by taking into account the prior experience of creating storyboards. Likewise, Balzotti (2016) considers storyboarding as an inclusive/invention tool to use in multi-modal writing classes. Storyboarding can help students in transferring their writing knowledge from basic (argumentative) writing tasks to specific (media) writing tasks. Students can relate their prior knowledge through drawing, visualizing, and creating a documentary on ideas and produce a new writing modal in an improved and collaborative way (Tanrıkulu, 2020; Hafour & Al-Rashidy, 2020). On the same path, Ramasari, Erlina, and Anggraini (2020) have found that the Project-Based Learning method employing a storyboard is a powerful tool to enhance their students’ speaking skills and this research has been conducted in two groups: control and experimental to examine the difference in speaking competence through storyboard approach. In the same way, Abuzaid and Al Kayed (2020) claim the storyboard technique improves the reading skill in their research conducted on 40 students at the elementary level. They have discovered in their study that students easily distinguish the letters which look similar in structure but are pronounced differently with the help of graphs. It is quite obvious that the storyboard is a powerful technique for students that involves them in more imaginative and innovative practices of learning. Based on the discussion above, it can be said that the use of a storyboard has very practical prospects that can be applied in the classroom. By recreating the story LLT Journal, e-ISSN 2579-9533, p-ISSN 1410-7201, Vol. 25, No. 2, October 2022, pp. 497-504 500 with a blend of forms and images, learners show their understanding of the task. The concept and use of storyboard is also a successful process to improve students' speaking, writing, and reading skills. They quickly understand, clarify, process, and evaluate the storyboard that they create (Knauf & Jantke, 2006). The student's learning process is improved in a better way rather than the traditional way as students cannot remember the whole document word by word because they may recall the sequence of learning in the right order with the help of storyboarding (Essley & Rocci, 2008). There are a lot of studies dealing with the storyboard in different disciplines or specific skills/tasks. The current paper reviews the previous studies and tries to fill in the gap of literature using the storyboard approach in language classrooms in general in an online and offline context. Teachers always must discover new and innovative ways to engage learners and improve their entire learning process. Though the storyboarding approach is not new, it comes all the way long since the 17th century. Leonardo da Vinci was known as the first to use storyboarding for his unfinished works to study it. Later, Walt Disney revived it for the cartoonists to draw their cartoons to complete the animated stories. In the 1960s, Mike Vance and Jerry McNeiiis introduced the concept of storyboarding to the business world for organizing project planning. As a planning technique, storyboarding is very effective that many leading business companies, fashion industries, and hospitals such as Ford Motor Company, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Mayo Clinic, Bank of America, and so on. Then it became a popular norm of film- making planning. Mike Vance himself employed it for the planning of Disneyworld. This technique always remains advantageous for the project planners to map out the visuals for organizational teams. In the contemporary world, educational institutions also started using storyboarding to develop the students’ cooperative learning skills which enable them to boost organizational expertise and deal with real-life problem-solving mechanics. Before creating the storyboard, an instructor must determine his/her presentation style and be fully aware of the different tools of the storyboard. For example, for online sessions, adequate knowledge about graphics, images, streaming videos and audio, sketches, and discussion boards, LMS is required for both the teachers and learners. To incorporate the storyboard in the virtual classes, an instructor must choose interactive glossaries, images, texts with images, graphics, PowerPoint presentations, videos and audio, fonts, and short quizzes. However, for the offline classes, the storyboard tools are not very different e.g., images, graphics, glossaries, index cards, PowerPoint presentations, sketches, bulletin, and planning boards to post the narrative pictures, videos, audios, text with images, etc. (Denison, 1995; Rehberg et al., 2001) Educators can storyboard the full course or only a unit/module depending on the requirements of the objectives of their courses. Storyboarding can be likely an effective approach to teaching language and literature as other courses e.g., film- making, finance, medicine, and computer science. In offline classes, a storyboard may look like a cartoon-like series of cells (Rehberg et al., 2001) or images with text. For an online module, a text-only storyboard with streaming videos and audio may be an effective way to apply storyboard. LLT Journal, e-ISSN 2579-9533, p-ISSN 1410-7201, Vol. 25, No. 2, October 2022, pp. 497-504 501 Figure 1. Student storyboard To get its optimal benefits, instructors must bring all ideas together in the form of a visual presentation with individual content pages, an outline, and precise methods and tools affixed with objectives that learners would apply to learn that module. Furthermore, storyboarding is benefited able for all types of learners visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (Gardner, 1983). Similarly, students with multiple personality traits (Spada & Lightbown, 2013) and multiple intelligence (Gardner, 1999) will take advantage of storyboarding, for example, extroverts and brilliant students may lead teamwork, and average and weak ones may get motivated and learn from their group. Introverts also show their performance and capabilities in a better way (Essley & Rocci, 2008). Additionally, it also helps lower the affective filter (Krashen, 1982) to get the optimum benefits of learning. Conclusion To conclude, it can be stated that instructional methods should not be bound to one type. Educators must explore multiple instructional techniques and approaches which can fulfill the goal of pedagogy. Storyboarding may be one useful technique to provide a variety of teaching and is very beneficial for both the learners and teachers because it engages the learners actively, creatively, and cognitively in classroom activities. At the same time, it develops teamwork, organizational, leadership, and problem-solving skills among students, so this technique works as a real-life skill and gives them the confidence to meet real-life challenges. Working on an electronic learning storyboard isn’t meant only for attainment concepts agreed by everyone involved. It’s also an application for users to discover the existing LLT Journal, e-ISSN 2579-9533, p-ISSN 1410-7201, Vol. 25, No. 2, October 2022, pp. 497-504 502 chances. It can be used to figure out how your pictorial presentations, User Interface, animatronics, and communication ideas fit into your flow of ideas, check whether they are paced fittingly through your method of instructions, and make sure that they bond with your teaching aims. Storyboarding also breaks your ideas into the pictorial building block to evaluate your idea more minutely and figure out the subtle weaknesses of conveying some complicated conceptual points as it allows you to view these pictorial building blocks separately with a new perspective each time. This technique also allows you to do variations in communication approaches according to your targeted learners. The storyboarding method may emerge as a more efficient conveying medium in the context of the teaching-learning process. Besides these features, it is also a more cost-effective and time-efficient method of teaching, which make it further apt for targeting more students. Above mentioned ideas evidence that the future of teaching-learning will revolute the scenario of education by the collaboration of traditional teaching with the innovative emerging electronic teaching approaches nonetheless, there should be stability between both means of instruction to make teaching more effective and learner-friendly. Acknowledgments The authors extend their appreciation to the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Khalid University for funding this work through a research program under grant number R.G.P. 1/361/43. References Abuzaid, H. & Al Kayed, M. (2020). The impact of using storyboards on improving reading skills of third-grade students with reading disabilities in Jordanian context. 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