A robot-based digital storytelling approach to enhancing EFL learners’ multimodal storytelling ability and narrative engagement

Digital technology has brought new opportunities for language education. Multimodal literacy refers to the ability to read, watch, understand, respond to, and generate multimodal texts. Multimodality, promoted by scholars, generates meaning in multiple modes. Hence, digital storytelling (DST) presented with multimodal content has been extensively applied in second language instruction. However, traditional DST is mostly presented in videos with one-way communication; it lacks two-way communication with the audience and is only regarded as a learning method for knowledge acquisition. As a result, the present study proposed a robot-based DST (robot-DST) approach to facilitate the interaction in the DST process and to enhance students' engagement. In order to evaluate its effectiveness, a quasi-experiment was conducted in an EFL course at a senior high school. Two classes of 11th graders participated in the experiment. One class with 40 students was the experimental group adopting the robot-DST approach, while the other class with 40 students was the control group adopting the conventional animation-based DST (CA-DST) approach. The results showed that the robot-DST approach could significantly reduce students' communication apprehension, as well as enhance their English speaking ability, storytelling ability, narrative engagement, and communication tendency. The findings show that using robots in the context of digital storytelling design has great potential for promoting learners’ language learning performances. Accordingly, in-depth discussion and suggestions for future research are provided for researchers and school teachers who intend to use robots in educational settings.