Digital Storytelling as a Scaffold for Academic Writing: A Sequential Explanatory Mixed Methods Study in Tertiary EFL Contexts

Abstract

Although digital storytelling has attracted considerable scholarly interest as a pedagogical tool in language education, relatively little empirical research has examined its specific role as a scaffold for academic writing in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) higher education institutions. The present study used a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design to examine the effects of a structured digital storytelling intervention on EFL undergraduate academic writing competence and to explore students' perceptions of the mechanisms underlying the observed improvements. Sixty-eight first-year students (n = 34 per group) from a public university in the Amhara Regional State of Ethiopia were assigned, through cluster randomization of two intact classes, to a digital storytelling condition or a conventional process-writing condition. Pre- and post-test writing scores were analyzed using Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA), and two focus-group discussions with purposively selected participants, together with weekly reflective journals, were used to explain the quantitative findings. Quantitative results indicated that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group on overall writing quality (F(1, 65) = 18.43, p < .001, η² = .22), with the strongest gains in coherence and cohesion, followed by lexical resource and task achievement; the gain in grammatical range and accuracy was not statistically significant. Qualitative findings explained these gains, showing that digital storytelling functioned as a cognitive, multimodal, affective, and social scaffold that helped students transition from personal narrative competence to formal academic discourse. The study demonstrates that digital storytelling is a viable and effective transitional scaffold that connects personal narrative competence with formal academic discourse when it is implemented systematically as a component of an academic writing curriculum. When used in a structured way as an augmentative supplement to the standard writing curriculum, DST can be most effective as a way to engage the affective, cognitive, and social components of writing that might be overlooked in traditional methods, developmentally moving from personal narration to disciplinary argumentation.