Pedagogical Insights from Multimodal Digital Story Production in English as Second Language Teaching

With the advent of digital media and information technology, digital story-telling (DST) has emerged as a popular multimodal input, merging traditional literacy with diverse modes of resources, such as images, audio, and animations, to create a contextually rich, language-enriched environment for language learners. DST has been found to be effective in promoting students’ language proficiency, encompassing listening, writing, reading, speaking, and comprehension. This study is situated in the conceptual framework of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) (Mishra & Koehler, 2007), and aims to explore the associations among three compo-nents of TPACK, namely technologies, pedagogical techniques, and content knowl-edge, as embodied in digital story videos produced by ESL pre-service teachers. The research involved 30 teacher students majoring in English language education at a university in Hong Kong, who created 20 multimodal digital story videos on topics related to character strengths and positive psychology. Based on an analysis of digital videos and face-to-face interviews, the results demonstrated the effec-tiveness of DST in shaping perceptions of technologies, the English language, and pedagogies directed by TPACK. The discussion on the integration of digital tech-nologies and teaching content into ESL practice provides insights into curriculum development and pedagogical suggestions. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025