Using Illustrated Stories to Scaffold Arabic Listening and Speaking: A Qualitative Case Study in an Indonesian Tahfizh Boarding School

Abstract

This qualitative case study examines how illustrated stories and short Arabic animated narratives were used to support listening and speaking instruction among first-year senior secondary students at Bina Tahfizh Indonesia Islamic boarding school in Bogor. The original classroom account involved six students and two teachers, with classroom observations and teacher interviews as its principal evidence. The article develops a five-stage pedagogical interpretation of the documented lessons: pre-listening prediction, synchronized audiovisual presentation, comprehension checking, oral reconstruction, and formative feedback. Findings suggest that visual sequencing offered contextual cues for following narrative events, recognizing familiar vocabulary, and organizing spoken responses. Teacher-guided retelling and role-play created opportunities for low-stakes oral participation. The interpretation is bounded by the small qualitative sample, incomplete interview and observation protocols, and the absence of recoverable individual language-test scores. Therefore, the article makes no claim of statistically significant improvement or causal treatment effects. By relating the local case to recent scholarship on multimodal learning, Arabic language pedagogy, and digital storytelling, the study proposes a practical framework for aligning narrative media with explicit listening and speaking goals and identifies priorities for more rigorous classroom inquiry.