Enhancing EFL Students’ Speaking Skills through Digital Storytelling: A Quasi-Experimental Study

Developing speaking skills remains a challenge for EFL learners, particularly in pronunciation and fluency, which often show limited improvement under conventional instruction. This study aimed to examine the effectiveness of Digital Storytelling (DST) in supporting students’ speaking skills in a secondary school context. A quantitative quasi-experimental design with a non-equivalent control group was employed, involving 55 eleventh-grade students at SMAN 4 Palu divided into an experimental group (n = 31) and a control group (n = 24). Data were collected through speaking pre-tests and post-tests and analyzed using descriptive statistics and paired-samples t-tests. The results showed that both groups improved in speaking performance. The experimental group improved in pronunciation from 57.61 to 70.16 and in fluency from 57.03 to 71.16, while the control group improved in pronunciation from 62.00 to 77.87 and in fluency from 63.33 to 81.66. A paired-samples t-test based on the combined scores of all participants revealed a statistically significant difference between pre-test and post-test results (t = 23.242, p < 0.001), indicating overall improvement after the instructional treatment. These findings suggest that DST can be considered a useful complementary strategy for enhancing students’ speaking skills through meaningful practice and multimodal engagement, although the results should be interpreted cautiously due to the limited sample size and the absence of random assignment.