Digital storytelling as a tool for social communication in the process of learning English language and literature

The aim of the study was to identify and theoretically substantiate the socio-communicative potential of digital storytelling in the process of learning English language and literature, taking into account the linguistic, collaborative, multimodal and narrative mechanisms of its pedagogical application. The study was carried out in the format of a structured literature review with a qualitative thematic synthesis. The search for scientific publications was carried out in March–May 2026 in international bibliographic databases with additional verification of bibliographic data and digital identifiers of publications. From 286 initially identified records, after removing duplicates, screening of titles and annotations and full-text evaluation, a corpus of 25 peer-reviewed works from 2022–2026 was formed. Thematic coding revealed that 72.0% of the publications covered language production, 68.0% – socio-communicative interaction, 64.0% – multimodal and narrative mediation, while only 16.0% directly integrated literary material. It was determined that the socio-communicative potential of digital stories is formed through interconnected language production, narrative structuring of content, collective agreement of meanings, multimodal recoding and audience orientation of the message. It was found that the linguistic and collaborative aspects have a much broader evidence base than the use of digital stories for the joint interpretation of a literary text. The revealed asymmetry indicates the insufficient integration of linguistic, social and literary directions in modern research. It is practical to organize the creation of digital stories as a structured collaborative activity that combines content interpretation, scenario planning, multimodal construction, and presentation of the result to the audience. Further research should empirically test such a model when working with English-language fiction texts.