Insights into Digital Storytelling and Its Support for Junior High School EFL Listening Comprehension
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24256/ideas.v14i2.11584Keywords:
digital storytelling; EFL learners; junior high school; listening comprehension; thematic analysisAbstract
The use of digital storytelling has been well accepted as a multimodal approach for improving listening comprehension skills of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. However, few studies have looked closely at how this process actually works in junior high school classrooms. This qualitative study explored how digital storytelling supports the listening comprehension of EFL students in junior high school in Indonesia, using classroom observations across four sessions and semi-structured interviews with six selected students, analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings showed three primary themes: (1) mechanism, where using both visual and audio helped students guess meanings and learn how to make inferences as a separate skill; (2) process, where listening strategies varied among students, structured help deepened understanding over sessions, and story difficulty shaped the learning process more than the final score; and (3) evaluation, where students’ feedback varied based on whether they thanked the method or their own basic skills for their improvement, while their interest was always high and clearly seen in class. The study concludes that digital storytelling gives positive and rich insights on listening comprehension through specific visual, audio, and inferential ways. It contributes new evidence to EFL listening teaching by focusing on the learning process rather than just the final results, and by differentiate student improvement that comes from method versus their own ability. Therefore, this paper suggests that digital storytelling needs to be integrated with direct pedagogical scaffolding instead of using it as a single activity.
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