Empowering EFL writing through digital storytelling: A quasi-experimental assessment of CALF measures and multidimensional engagement

This mixed-methods study aims to investigate the impact of traditional and digital storytelling (DST) on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' writing performance in terms of complexity, accuracy, lexical diversity, and fluency (CALF) measures. Moreover, the study sheds light on how learners were engaged along behavioral, cognitive, affective, and agentive dimensions when completing the DST task. The participants were 45 intermediate-level college students who were assigned to the DST and traditional storytelling (TST) groups. Under a four-week curriculum, the participants constructed their stories by using either an online platform or traditional pen-and-paper format. Adopting a quasi-experiment design, within-group and between-group comparisons were made. A series of paired samples t-tests were run to compare the pretest and post-test of each group (within-group comparison) and assessed any improvement from the pretest to the post-test across CALF measures. Also, a 2 × 2 mixed-methods analysis of variance (ANOVA) was run on the post-test scores of the two groups across CALF measures (between-group comparisons). The results of these tests unveiled that the storytelling task, in either traditional or digital mode, effectively enhanced students' overall writing performance. However, there was a significant impact of DST on syntactic complexity, accuracy, and lexical diversity, while writing fluency remained unaffected. Moreover, the results of the questionnaire and interview data revealed the students' multidimensional engagement (behavioral, cognitive, affective, and agentive) while performing the DST task, with the agentive aspect emerging as most prominent. Pedagogical implications of incorporating DST in EFL contexts were discussed.