Reducing EFL Students’ Speaking Anxiety through Digital Storytelling: A Mixed-Methods Study in an Indonesian Vocational School

Abstract

This study investigated the effectiveness of digital storytelling in reducing EFL students’ speaking anxiety in an Indonesian vocational school context. Speaking anxiety remains one of the major affective barriers that limits students’ willingness to participate in English oral communication, particularly when they are required to speak in front of others. Digital storytelling was implemented as a technology-assisted speaking strategy that allowed students to plan, rehearse, record, revise, and present their spoken stories through multimodal media. This study employed a mixed-methods design by combining a one-group pretest–posttest quantitative design with qualitative data obtained through interviews, classroom observations, and documentation. The participants were 30 tenth-grade students from the Computer and Network Engineering program at SMKN 1 Wajo, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. The intervention was conducted over four weeks through structured digital storytelling activities. Quantitative data were collected using a speaking anxiety questionnaire administered before and after the treatment, while qualitative data were used to explore students’ learning experiences during the implementation of digital storytelling. The findings showed a significant reduction in students’ speaking anxiety after the intervention. The mean score decreased from 73.23 in the pre-test to 61.70 in the post-test. The Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test confirmed a statistically significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores, Z = -4.783, p < 0.001, with a large effect size of r = 0.87. Qualitative findings revealed that digital storytelling helped students feel more confident, better prepared, less pressured, and more engaged in speaking activities. The study concludes that digital storytelling can serve as an effective affective and pedagogical strategy for reducing EFL students’ speaking anxiety in vocational school contexts.