Multimodal narrative intervention to improve L2 oral narrative skills in secondary schools: A hybrid effectiveness-implementation study

This study examined the effects of a MultiModal Narrative intervention (MMN-EFL) on second language oral narrative skills and its implementation in English-as-Foreign-Language classrooms. Participants were 133 10th-grade adolescents from eight classes, randomly assigned to treatment and control conditions. Over two weeks, treatment classes received six MMN-EFL sessions involving story retelling practice enriched with multimodality (e.g., gestures and facial expressions), while control classes continued instruction as usual. At pretest and posttest, all participants retold trained and untrained stories and generated personal stories. Narratives were analyzed for narrative discourse, sentence complexity, number of different words, mean length of utterance, percentage of past tense, and total number of words. Results showed that MMN-EFL intervention led to larger improvements than the control group across all narrative measures in the retelling tasks. Gains in narrative discourse and sentence complexity were transferred to personal storytelling. Students perceived MMN-EFL as highly acceptable, appropriate, effective, and worth continuing.