Animating Academic Writing Skills Through Creating Animated Educational Videos

This research project critically explores creating educational animated videos as a learning approach for pre-service teachers to develop their academic writing skills. The course took place in the English Education Department of a national public university in Korea, where students are studying to graduate as public school teachers. The process of creating animated videos was used as a scaffold to develop pre-service teachers’ academic writing skills and techniques and to add more authenticity and purpose to their current writing experiences. Results from online surveys, interviews, a thematic content analysis and students’ written work indicated creating animated videos had positive impacts on students’ writing skills, especially in writing clearly, focusing on the main ideas, and supporting those ideas with explanations and examples. The data also showed that students developed a greater awareness of audience and sense of purpose. However, time restrictions, technical challenges, and previous learning experiences remain issues to be addressed in future research. In the meantime, this research project shows that creating animated videos holds great promise as a learning approach to develop students’ writing skills and to give pre-service teachers more meaningful and authentic learning experiences of a 21st century approaches to writing.