Enhancing L2 Learners’ Self-Regulated Speaking Through Digital Oral Dialogue Journaling: An EFL Classroom-based Study

Abstract

Two decades of L2 self-regulated learning (SRL) research has focused heavily on reading and writing, leaving speaking an under-explored area. While speaking is an important yet difficult communicative skill to master that often generates high anxiety for English learners, EFL contexts seldom provide enough practice opportunities beyond the classroom. The study introduces an innovative pedagogy – digital oral dialogue journaling (DODJ) – and investigates its effectiveness in cultivating SRL speaking strategy use in a Hong Kong secondary school. A total of 95 recorded journal videos were created by a class of 19 students and uploaded to the digital platform Flipgrid over five weeks to receive dialogic feedback from the teacher on a weekly basis. Students’ speaking strategy use was conceptualized from a social cognitive SRL framework, and changes were measured using a pre- and post-intervention questionnaire as well as through two semi-structured interviews. Results of repeated measures MANOVA and ANOVA tests reveal significant increases in multiple cognitive and metacognitive strategies such as rehearsing, memorizing, and evaluating. Interview findings further show that certain DODJ design features facilitated the changes, including flexible topic selection and scheduling, unlimited video submission and review, and emoticon masking and dialogic teacher feedback. Pedagogical suggestions are offered on how to design effective DODJ practice to cultivate L2 learners to become strategic, self-regulated speakers.

Keywords

Classroom-based study self-regulated learning (SRL)speaking digital tools L2 output

Introduction

Self-regulated learning (SRL) has become an important L2 research topic over the past two decades, since Dörnyei's (2005) seminal introduction of the notion. Self-regulated learners agentively set goals, plan, monitor and evaluate their learning processes, and have been consistently found to achieve higher L2 learning outcomes (Teng and Zhang, 2022). Existing L2 self-regulation research has focused heavily on reading, writing, and vocabulary learning, yet oral communication skills such as listening and speaking remain under-explored (Zhou and Thomas, 2025).

In English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts, students usually have limited opportunities outside of classrooms to practice speaking. Communicating to others through an L2 often generates high anxiety for students, further lowering their willingness to communicate and discouraging them from participating in authentic communicative tasks (Zhou et al., 2020). It is therefore essential for teachers to seek out additional ways for students to regularly engage in meaningful spoken communication within a low-stress, supportive environment. Digital oral dialogue journaling (DODJ) is one such activity that offers learners opportunities to participate in ongoing verbal interactions with their teacher. Unlike typical pedagogic speaking tasks (see Aubrey et al., 2022), DODJ involves the creation of video self-recordings for asynchronous interaction, which helps learners avoid the anxiety and pressure associated with spontaneous face-to-face communication. At the same time, DODJ enables natural language use by allowing learners to speak on topics of personal interest. Research on content-based instruction has shown that the use of meaningful content in L2 classrooms can foster more active learner participation, and encourage production of more complex target language and higher-order cognitive activities (Huang, 2011). The interactions between learners and their teacher through DODJ entries may facilitate repeated planning and performing that promotes self-regulated learning.

The current study, therefore, investigates the effectiveness of using DODJ to promote students’ self-regulated speaking outside of classrooms. In doing so, the study adds to the comparatively small pool of L2 self-regulation research that focuses on speaking, and introduces DODJ as an innovative teaching methodology that school teachers can adopt to build up students’ speaking communicative competence extramurally.

Background to the Study

Self-regulated Learning and L2 Speaking

Self-regulated learners are metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active in directing their own learning process to attain specific learning goals. A social cognitive understanding of self-regulation highlights a goal-oriented, cyclical process of learning comprised of three interrelated stages of forethought, performance, and self-reflection (Zimmerman and Moylan, 2009). In the forethought phase, students set learning goals and make plans based on a strategic appraisal of their objectives and current competence. Then in the performance phase, students adopt task-specific strategies to address different task components and monitor their learning process for adjustment. Finally in the self-reflection phase, students evaluate the process and outcomes of their learning, reflect on causes for any positive or negative outcomes, and make adaptations that feed into the next cycle of learning. This social cognitive cyclical SRL model has guided educational research extensively over the past two decades (see Panadero, 2017 for a review). It has been applied to understand various aspects of L2 learning in recent years, such as writing (Teng and Zhang, 2018), reading (Morshedian et al., 2017), and listening (Zhou and Thomas, 2025). However, as far as we know, this framework has not been applied to understand L2 students’ coordination of different SRL processes to improve speaking, though a few studies have attempted to develop speaking scales based on other SRL frameworks (e.g., Sun, 2022). Using Zimmerman and Moylan's (2009) multi-stage model, this study offers a systematic investigation of the effectiveness of DODJ as a new pedagogical practice to foster speaking skills across three SRL stages. It also addresses the paucity of intervention studies on self-regulated speaking in L2 research.

In EFL contexts where students have limited communicative opportunities outside of the classroom, self-initiated and regulated speaking practice is particularly important. In Hong Kong, where the present study situates, speaking remains an overlooked English skill in local school teaching, despite a clear educational policy directive to foster students’ English competence to “think and communicate” (Curriculum Development Council, 2017: 18). There is now a considerable body of research showing that L2 speaking skills are best developed through engaging learners in pedagogic tasks that involve meaning-focused communication (for a review, see Bryfonski and McKay, 2019). Such speaking tasks provide learners with opportunities to acquire language incidentally and in line with their learning needs. However, incorporating speaking tasks into an EFL curriculum can be problematic because the spontaneous language production needed to perform an interactive task can put undue pressure on learners, resulting in heightened anxiety and disfluent or inappropriate language use (Woodrow, 2006). For example, Mak (2011) reported that English learners in Hong Kong suffered from speaking anxiety for reasons such as fear of negative evaluation and being corrected when speaking. Furthermore, anxiety has been found to be a significant mediating variable between language competence and willingness to communicate (Zhou et al., 2020). Task communication between learners has also been criticized for generating impoverished interactions that contain limited feedback opportunities (Widdowson, 2003). This situation calls for effective pedagogical support that engages learners in meaningful, personalized communication while also creating a low-pressure environment so that learners can plan and evaluate speaking based on effective feedback on their performance to sustain a self-regulated cycle of learning.

Using Digital Dialogue Journaling for L2 Speaking

Dialogue journaling was initially proposed as “a written, ongoing interaction between individual students and their teacher in a bound notebook” (Peyton, 1997: 199). Dialogue journals can take the form of guided or unguided, and are used for interactions between teachers and students on a regular basis. As an L2 writing activity, dialogue journaling has been found to benefit students’ writing by providing timely teacher feedback and creating a low-pressure platform that motivates writing practice (Chan and Aubrey, 2024).

Prototyped on the written form of dialogue journaling, our study developed digital oral dialogue journaling (DODJ) that uses the digital video platform Flipgrid¹ to record ongoing verbal interactions between the teacher and students. Flipgrid is an online video discussion platform that allows students to post short videos to share with others. Teachers can upload response videos to give feedback on each student's videos through open or private dialogues. Previous studies investigating DODJ have used cassettes and emails to collect videos (e.g., Dantas-Whitney, 2002; Ho, 2003). Flipgrid outperforms these channels as students can login to the platform, create and submit videos anytime. They can also review their videos, re-record to correct mistakes, and resubmit as many times as they like. Research has shown that this preparation process enables students to gradually refine their language and content through planning and rehearsal, leading to more fluent and accurate performances (e.g., Lambert et al., 2021). For students who suffer from speaking anxiety, Flipgrid allows users to cover their faces with emoticons or pictures to reduce apprehension. Because of these features, previous research has reported that learners value Flipgrid as a non-threatening learning tool that may alleviate L2 speaking anxiety and potentially promote higher levels of autonomous language learning (Hammett, 2021; Pham, 2023).

The adoption of DODJ can potentially foster self-regulated L2 speaking, especially when its use is guided by teachers on a regular basis. Features of DODJ may support strategy use that corresponds to the three phases of the social cognitive SRL model. In the forethought phase before students make video recordings, DODJ may encourage students to plan what they are going to say by writing scripts or making notes. During the performance phase, students may rehearse, monitor, and self-correct their recordings to resubmit until satisfied. Finally, in the self-reflection phase after they have uploaded the videos, students receive personalized teacher feedback that may help them evaluate their performance and identify areas for improvement. The private conversation function of Flipgrid can create a low-pressure environment that gives students individualized, tailored feedback, while creating a safe communicative environment by not revealing the conversations to other students.

The present study thus aims to examine the effectiveness of DODJ on promoting students’ self-regulated speaking through a five-week teaching intervention at a local secondary school in Hong Kong. Specially, the study seeks to answer two research questions:

To what extent is DODJ effective in improving students’ use of self-regulated learning strategies for L2 speaking?

What are the features of DODJ that affect its effectiveness for cultivating self-regulated learners for L2 speaking?

Methods

Context and Participants

The classroom-based study was conducted at a junior secondary school in Hong Kong. The English curriculum of the school had an overemphasis on grammar, reading, and writing, with a noted lack of training in oral communicative skills. Students attended eight 40-minute English lessons per week in which only one lesson focused on speaking. During the speaking lesson, the teacher helped students to practice and prepare for a high-stakes speaking exam with a fixed set of topics. The lack of communicative training and exam-oriented practice at the school had led to students’ general lack of motivation and confidence in English speaking. The study was thus carried out as a classroom-based intervention by the second author, who was working as an English teacher at the school when the study was implemented, to enhance students’ self-regulated speaking through DODJ as an innovative pedagogy.

All 19 students of Year 3 English class participated in the study. The students were aged between 13 and 14 years old, and included 11 female and 8 male students. All students had Chinese as their L1. At the time of the study, they had on average completed seven years of formal English learning and generally achieved an intermediate level of English proficiency. All students were taught by the same teacher for five weeks during the intervention. In Week 1, students were invited to complete a pre-intervention questionnaire, and then to fill in a post-intervention questionnaire in Week 5. Through a maximum variation sampling strategy, a sub-cohort of 12 students were invited to participate in interviews twice during the study. Four students each were sampled to represent high (top 25%), medium (30–60%) and low achievement levels (bottom 25%) of the cohort based on their English speaking test scores at the term start. Six male students and six female students participated in the interviews.

Design of the Study and Data Collection

The classroom-based study was conducted over a five-week period (see Figure 1) and adopted a one-group, pre-test, post-test design, drawing on both quantitative (questionnaire) and qualitative data (semi-structured interviews). In Week 1, the teacher introduced the study to the students and invited them to fill in a consent form on a voluntary basis to participate. The students were informed that their responses would be kept in strict confidentiality, and they could withdraw from the study at any time for any or no reason. The teacher also explained to the students that their participation and responses in the study would not in any way affect their academic grades and would be used for research purposes only.

The DODJ teaching intervention was implemented for five consecutive weeks during the Spring semester. The teacher introduced DODJ to students in Week 1 in class and handed out an instructional page outlining requirements (see Appendix 1). Students were required to submit a 1-minute video recording on a weekly basis via Flipgrid. A list of suggested topics was provided in the instructions, but students were also allowed to choose topics they were interested in. The teacher set the length of the video to one minute but did not specify content or language structures to encourage creativity and language experimentation. The teacher then uploaded videos to provide feedback to students’ video recordings in an ongoing conversational manner. The feedback focused on content rather than language to engage students for further output, and the student videos were not graded to assure students of the experimental purpose of the study. A total of 95 video recordings were received from the student cohort by Week 5. Only the teacher and the student who uploaded each video could access the videos and feedback so as to create a one-on-one teacher–student conversation to reduce students’ speaking anxiety.

Data were collected through an SRL speaking strategy questionnaire and semi-structured interviews to investigate potential changes in students’ strategic behaviors. The questionnaire was administered online before and after the DODJ intervention. Semi-structured interviews were conducted twice, once in the middle of the intervention in Week 3, and the other at the end in Week 5, to record students’ reflections on their learning experiences with DODJ throughout. All interviews were conducted on an individual basis in students’ L1 Chinese to facilitate elaboration and discussion. Each interview lasted around 20 minutes and all interviews were audio-recorded for transcribing and data analysis.

Measures

A self-regulated speaking strategy questionnaire was implemented twice, once before (Week 1) and once after the intervention (Week 5), to investigate changes in students’ SRL strategy use. The scale was adapted from Salehi and Jafari's (2015) validated SRL scale for EFL learning with a minor adjustment in wording to suit a focus on EFL speaking. This scale was chosen because it was developed based on a social cognitive SRL framework (Zimmerman and Moylan, 2009) that comprehensively covers seven strategies mappable to the three SRL stages, including (1) Forethought: goal setting and planning, environmental structuring; (2) Performance: organizing and transforming, rehearsing and memorizing, keeping records and monitoring, seeking social assistance; and (3) Self-reflection: self-evaluation. The 22-item questionnaire was measured on a 6-point Likert scale from 1 “strongly disagree” to 6 “strongly agree” and demonstrated good internal reliability for the pre- (Cronbach's α = 0.81) and post-tests (Cronbach's α = 0.82).

Semi-structured interviews were conducted in the middle (Week 3) and the end of the intervention (Week 5). A list of questions was prepared to understand (1) students’ SRL speaking strategy use, (2) their perceptions on the effects of DODJ on strategy use, and (3) features of DODJ design that result in its effectiveness or lack of effectiveness to cultivate SRL speaking. The interviews were conducted by the teacher to quickly establish trust with the student participants to receive insightful answers (Burns, 2010). The teacher announced to the students that their participation in this project had no influence on their evaluation in the course. The interview questions were designed as open as possible, and probes were provided to the participants when relevant themes were touched upon to facilitate their in-depth reflection. The interviews were transcribed and translated by the second author who is a Chinese-English bilingual. The first author then checked the accuracy of transcription and translation to ensure that the meaning aligned with that in the original language.

Data Analysis

To answer Research Question 1, students’ responses in the pre- and post-intervention questionnaires were analyzed through repeated measures MANOVA in SPSS 27.0 to first explore the main effect of time on the collective use of SRL speaking strategy use, followed by univariate ANOVA tests to identify changes that occur for each strategy type. Qualitative interview data were analyzed using NVivo 11.0 to answer Research Question 2 through thematic analysis (Kuckartz, 2014). Primary categories of SRL strategies were informed top-down by Zimmerman and Moylan's (2009) three-phase model, while allowing sub-categories and themes to emerge inductively from the data. DODJ features were coded inductively from the data to form categories and sub-categories. To ensure coding reliability, all coding was conducted jointly by the first author, who was independent from data collection, and the second author, who was the teacher that collected the data. This joint coding combined the first author's objective stance with the second author's understanding of the context to ensure the coded categories and themes were reliable and contextually meaningful. This consensus coding involved continuous discussion to settle disagreements, which aimed to reduce potential variation resulting from a single coder. Using the “matrix coding” query function, excerpts coded under both categories of DODJ features and SRL strategies were retrieved for a synthesized analysis of what DODJ features affect SRL speaking strategy use.

Results

Research Question 1: Effects of DODJ on Self-regulated L2 Speaking

Repeated measures MANOVA was conducted to first examine whether there was a significant collective change in students’ SRL strategy use for L2 speaking before (T1/Week 1) and after (T2/Week 5) the DODJ intervention (see Table 1). Assumptions were checked including multivariate normality, linearity, and the absence of multicollinearity between dependent variables. Wilks' lambda was reported because the assumptions were met. In general, there was a statistically significant change in students’ collective use of different SRL strategies (F_{[7, 12]}= 9.27, p < .001; Wilks' Λ = 0.16, η_p²= 0.84), attesting to an overall effect of DODJ on SRL.

Table 1.

Results for repeated measures MANOVA on collective SRL strategy use over time.

Dependent variable	Wilks' lambda	F	Hypothesis df	Error df	Sig.	Partial Eta Squared (η_p²)
SRL speaking strategy use	0.16	9.27	7	12	< .001	0.84

Univariate ANOVA tests were further conducted to identify changes in each strategy type. Table 2 outlines the descriptive statistics for students’ strategy use before (T1/Week 1) and after the DODJ intervention (T2/Week 5), and Table 3 presents the results for the ANOVA tests. Of all the strategies that demonstrated significant changes, the strategy of Rehearsing and memorizing increased most radically, as indicated by the largest effect size among all (F_{[1, 18]}= 16.6, p < .001, η_p²= 0.54). This suggests that students became more industrious in preparing for their recordings through repeated rehearsal and memorizing of scripts. Increases in Self-evaluation (F_{[1, 18]}= 6.71, p = .02, η_p²= 0.28) and Environmental structuring strategy (F_{[1, 18]}= 5.16, p = .04, η_p²= 0.22) were also notable, indicating that students might have become more aware of finding suitable environments to practice and were more likely to assess how well they practiced after the DODJ intervention.

Table 2.

Descriptive statistics for SRL speaking strategy use at T1 and T2.

SRL stages	SRL speaking strategy	T1 (Week 1)		T2 (Week 5)
SRL stages	SRL speaking strategy	Mean	SD	Mean	SD
Forethought	Goal setting and planning	3.50	1.00	3.93	0.89
Forethought	Environmental structuring	3.75	0.87	4.35	0.83
Performance	Organizing and transforming	3.86	0.69	3.16	0.77
	Rehearsing and memorizing	3.35	0.70	4.35	0.60
	Seeking social assistance	4.25	0.91	3.51	1.13
	Keeping records and monitoring	4.18	0.70	4.53	0.80
Self-reflection	Self-evaluation	3.26	1.08	4.03	0.94

Table 3.

Results for univariate ANOVA tests on each SRL strategy over time.

SRL strategy type	Type III Sum of Squares	df	Mean²	F	Sig.	Partial Eta Squared (η²)
Goal setting and planning	1.83	1	1.83	1.87	0.19	0.09
Environmental structuring	3.42	1	3.42	5.16	0.04	0.22
Organizing and transforming	3.18	1	3.18	5.56	0.03	0.24
Rehearsing and memorizing	15.8	1	15.8	16.6	<.001	0.54
Seeking social assistance	5.15	1	5.15	3.30	0.09	0.16
Keeping records and monitoring	1.17	1	1.17	1.70	0.21	0.09
Self-evaluation	5.53	1	5.53	6.71	0.02	0.28

Research Question 2: Features of DODJ that Affect Self-regulated L2 Speaking

Qualitative findings generally support quantitative results to show that after using DODJ, students were more inclined to use SRL strategies such as topic planning and rehearsing, and more frequently monitored, evaluated, and self-corrected their oral output during and after recording. Certain DODJ features were reflected to trigger changes in students’ SRL behavior.

One of the most valued features of DODJ was its flexibility in topic selection and scheduling practice. Such flexibility promoted a sense of control and autonomy, and resulted in an increase in students’ strategic planning, scripting, and rehearsing of the speaking tasks. Ken (Week 3, high proficiency), for example, commented: “Since there was no time limit for DODJ and I could choose my own topic, it motivated me to write a script [for recording] because I was writing what I was truly interested in.” The flexibility of recording videos extramurally at students’ own convenience opened up extra opportunities for learning. Johnston (Week 3, medium proficiency) described spending as long as one hour to finish recording a 1-minute video:

I would write a script and practice reading it. Because I needed to do some research about the topic before recording, finishing the script usually took around half an hour. I would search for the synonyms in the script online to replace the simple words I used. I would also need to practice with my script at least three to four times. In total, I always needed around an hour to finish recording a video.

Unlike in-class discussions, DODJ provided students with the luxury of time to research, write a script, memorize, and rehearse outside of normal class time. Making a 1-minute video thus created additional learning opportunities beyond the immediate task of recording. Johnston's attempt to “replace the simple words” by synonyms indicated the use of transforming strategy to expand his vocabulary knowledge and apply such knowledge as part of his communicative competence. Notably, such planning and scripting behavior was especially common among high and medium proficiency speakers. Highlighting “there is a need to plan before recording,” students created a script to help them “stay on track and finish the recording in fewer takes” (Jay, Week 5, high proficiency) and “consult online dictionary to listen to pronunciation and modify words” (Ronnie, Week 5, medium proficiency).

The unlimited submission and video review functions were other key features of DODJ that students repeatedly mentioned during the interviews. These features were noted to facilitate students’ metacognitive monitoring and self-evaluation. For low proficiency students, they often reported a preference for impromptu recording without using a script. The option of re-recording submission multiple times during speaking encouraged their self-monitoring and immediate correction. Tracy (Week 5, low proficiency), for instance, described how this function allowed her to note and rectify mistakes easily:

Since this [DODJ] task is less stressful than group discussions in class, it's acceptable to not be perfect. As I didn’t have a script, I often made mistakes while recording but I could correct myself at once. I could re-record a particular section again and again without restarting from the beginning … I prefer self-correction, because I did not like re-recording and re-watching the whole video.

Perceiving the DODJ task as “less stressful” with little need to “be perfect,” Tracy preferred live monitoring and immediate, partial correction of oral output, and this preference was commonly noted by all four low proficiency students. In contrast, their peers with higher proficiency reported more post-recording evaluation. Although these students often used a script to pre-plan and guide their recording, they still reported that they would “check the video again and again to make sure there were no problems” (Johnston, Week 5, medium proficiency) and “record a new video to replace the old one” if it was found “unsatisfactory” (Jane, Week 5, high proficiency). For these students, their attempts were directed at perfecting the videos, benchmarked to a higher standard than their low proficiency peers.

Finally, the emoticon masking and dialogic teacher feedback were features noted by students to reduce their apprehensive emotions in English speaking, which were particularly helpful for lowering their fear of making mistakes while speaking. Low proficiency students especially welcomed the function of Flipgrid that allowed them to cover their faces with emoji images. In several interview encounters, these students expressed a reluctance to reveal and confront their ‘true self’ while making the recordings. Monica (Week 3, low proficiency), for example, noted that she did not like watching her videos after recording them because “I didn’t want to see my face.” Commenting that “it's important that I can cover my face because I don’t like filming myself,” she especially valued the emoticon masking function for reducing her embarrassment when recording herself speaking in English.

The teacher's individualized, meaning-focused feedback appeared to be another DODJ feature that lowered students’ anxiety to encourage their continuous output. In our study, the teacher offered oral feedback through private dialogues with students, and uploaded a short response video for each student every week. The main focus of feedback was on meaning conveyance rather than accuracy, where the teacher drew on particular points in students’ videos and asked questions to encourage further discussion. Ian (Week 5, low proficiency) stated that such feedback made him less afraid of making speaking mistakes:

I didn’t write scripts for the last few videos. Since it's a relaxing task and the teacher's feedback was less harsh than that in classroom speaking practice, I’m less afraid of making mistakes now. It's not necessary to have a script now, but I just need to rehearse several times to make sure I don’t go off track.

Ian's comment shows that the teacher's meaning-focused dialogic feedback freed him from the anxiety of speaking “error-free” English. It should be noted, however, that such feedback also resulted in less planned learning behavior such as script writing. Ian's reduced reliance on using a script suggests that he might have become more confident in improvised speaking activities. Nonetheless, it should also be cautioned that this behavioral change could indicate a potential misunderstanding that accuracy was downplayed and should no longer be attended to. For several low proficiency students, their uploaded videos were consisted of fragmented speech with simple, repetitive use of vocabulary and sentence structures. The meaning-focused dialogic teacher feedback should thus be applied with caution in DODJ, given that its main effect seemed to be improving students’ willingness to communicate and lowering speaking anxiety rather than enhancing speaking accuracy.

Discussion and Pedagogical Implications

Using DODJ to Promote a Sustained Cycle of Self-regulated L2 Speaking Practice

Our study highlights the potential of DODJ as an out-of-class, authentic speaking task for fostering a sustained cycle of self-regulated practice for students. The quantitative findings illustrate an overall improvement in students’ SRL speaking strategy use after a five-week DODJ intervention. The qualitative findings further reveal growth in specific strategic behavior across different SRL phases. This cyclical nature of students’ speaking practice reflects a social cognitive SRL model that advances our understanding of strategic speaking – an under-explored skill area in L2 self-regulation research thus far (Teng and Zhang, 2022).

In a social cognitive SRL model (Zimmerman and Moylan, 2009), the forethought phase usually starts with strategic analysis and planning of a learning task, and this stage is heavily underpinned by motivational beliefs. In our study, students reported feeling more motivated to practice speaking because of their interest in self-selected topics. This echoes Ho's (2003) study in Taiwan where the researcher noted that students became intrinsically motivated in speaking English after using audiotaped journaling to discuss topics they were interested in. Since interest is an integral component that shapes the value learners attach to a learning task, allowing students to choose meaningful, authentic topics that they are interested in may drive self-directed and autonomous practice of speaking. Teachers can also collect topics generated by students to include in their curriculum later so that responsibilities could be shifted from “teacher-directed courses to a negotiated curriculum” that is more student-centered (Burton and Caroll, 2001: 3).

When learning is intrinsically motivated and self-driven, students are more likely to coordinate a wider range of task-specific strategies that benefit their learning (Zhou et al., 2025). In the SRL performance phase, students in our study reported using more memorizing and rehearsal strategies to practice speaking before recording themselves. Memorizing and rehearsing were traditionally discussed as “surface-level” strategies directed at merely coping and completing a learning task with superficial processing of knowledge (Zhou and Thomas, 2023). However, our interview findings show that students’ use of memorizing and rehearsing strategies was not a stand-alone act, but was clustered with other deep-level strategies such as organizing and transforming. Johnston in our study, for example, reported spending as long as one hour to record a 1-minute video. Extending beyond the immediate task of recording the video, he searched for and organized relevant information to compose a script, and substituted simple words with new, advanced vocabulary to transform and improve the script. His script rehearsal was therefore clustered with the use of multiple deep-level strategies directed at creating meaningful learning opportunities for better mastery of the skill instead of just finishing the task.

Finally, DODJ encourages self-reflection and evaluation, which are key SRL processes that generate learning adaptations to incur a new, subsequent cycle of learning. Both quantitative and qualitative findings of our study show that students became more metacognitively aware of their performance and reviewed, evaluated, and reflected on their speaking more heavily after adopting DODJ. This finding corroborates Dantas-Whitney's (2002) audiotaped journal study, which reported ESL students listening to their own recordings to note pronunciation issues and re-record for improvement. In English university courses in Hong Kong, Hafner and Miller (2018) developed a project-based learning curriculum for science students in which students were asked to produce a scientific documentary through collaborative teamwork. The project was designed to reflect diverse curriculum design components, including analyzing learner needs, designing appropriate materials and learning activities, and evaluating learning outcomes. Although students in our study have mainly used DODJ to practice outside of normal class time, it is possible to implement DODJ at a curriculum level similar to that in Hafner and Miller's project. For example, students could be asked to work towards developing a final product in the form of an e-book or a documentary as a summative assessment, and DODJ could serve as a formative assessment that helps students to brainstorm, draft, and revise the product for the final assessment. Teachers could offer DODJ topics that students are interested in based on a needs analysis of what students want. In-class teaching can be tailored to students’ needs by pre-teaching relevant language structures. Reflective activities could also be carried out in group discussions to help students self-reflect on their strengths and weaknesses and encourage them to set personalized learning goals through DODJ. As such, a sustained cycle of self-regulated speaking practice based on collaborative and autonomous learning could be formed within and beyond the classroom.

Designing Effective DODJ: Teacher Feedback and Digital Platform Features

Our interview findings highlight that the design of DODJ should be grounded in careful consideration of the role of teacher and the functions of hosting digital platforms to optimize its positive effect on fostering self-regulated L2 speaking.

The main role of the teacher in DODJ is to provide feedback on a regular basis and interact with students through ongoing dialogues. A key issue to consider, therefore, is what type of feedback the teacher should provide, and for what purposes. In our study, the teacher provided conversation-style, content-based feedback with a primary goal of motivating students. Our interview findings show that although this type of feedback reduced students’ speaking anxiety and facilitated active participation, it was interpreted by some students as a signal to downplay the accuracy of speaking. As Ellis (2010) proposes, students’ responses to feedback can be cognitive, behavioral, and affective. Whereas reduced apprehension is an important positive affective response, students also need to benefit metacognitively from the feedback to recognize weaknesses in their speaking, and to take action to revise or improve their performance. We therefore support Makarchuk's (2010) suggestion to encourage a feedback system that provides a mix of content- and language-based comments. Teachers can first respond to the content and ask questions to induce further output, and then selectively provide feedback on repeated language errors that hinder communication. When providing language-related feedback, prompts to facilitate students’ self-correction are particularly preferred over direct reformulation as they facilitate students’ self-diagnosis and metacognitive monitoring for speaking (Rahimi and Zhang, 2015).

The other key factor to consider when designing effective DODJ is the role of selected digital platforms to host the oral journal recordings. Flipgrid, the platform used in this study, was valued for key functions including (1) self-recorded video review, (2) unlimited submission attempts, (3) emoticon masking, and (4) private teacher–student dialogues. L2 teachers can choose other similar platforms with these functions when adopting DODJ to maximize its effect on promoting self-regulated speaking.

The functions of allowing users to review and resubmit their video recordings without limits were found to drive students’ self-monitoring and evaluation of their language use, and facilitated adaptive re-recording. Active and effective monitoring has often been found to characterize highly proficient speakers (Albarqi and Tavakoli, 2023). In our study, however, students with lower proficiency also reported monitoring their output in real time and immediately correcting their mistakes by re-recording certain sections of the video. Unlike in classroom discussions where self-corrections leave “traces of mistakes,” the re-recording and resubmission functions of Flipgrid make it possible to create better videos without revealing such traces. This might explain why even low proficiency students were motivated to monitor and rectify their output in DODJ recording. For students with higher proficiency, our findings reveal that they preferred post-recording review and resubmission for improvement. This finding aligns with Dantas-Whitney's (2002) study, where students also reported to record the video repeatedly to correct grammatical and pronunciation mistakes. In our study, the fact that students with higher proficiency tended to compose and rehearse scripts for recording indicates that such students might treat DODJ more seriously as additional learning opportunities for self-improvement rather than just an assignment. Their review-resubmission was directed at perfecting the video, and could be viewed as positive adaptive learning that can drive new, sustained cycles of SRL in the longer term (Zhou and Thomas, 2025).

The selected digital platform in this study also created a non-threatening, relaxing environment by enabling private dialogues between teachers and students, and by allowing the use of emoticon images to cover students’ faces, as they preferred. English speaking is often viewed as a skill likely to generate high anxiety that leads to students’ underperformance (Zhou et al., 2020). The private dialogue function thus created a less stressful online environment to reduce L2 anxiety associated with speaking in front of other classmates (Pham, 2023). The use of the emoticon feature such as a virtual face mask could also serve “as a shield from being on-stage” (Bradley and Lomicka, 2000: 362), protecting the self-image of students who suffer from high speaking anxiety by allowing them to stay anonymous. It should be noted, however, that these functions should only be used as temporary scaffolding to build up students’ speaking self-efficacy and competence. Once students become more willing and confident to speak, the pedagogical focus should shift towards fostering communicative competence for authentic, face-to-face interactions so that they are not confined to the planned monologue provided by DODJ.

Conclusion

This classroom-based study draws on a one-group, pre-test, post-test design that collects quantitative and qualitative data to examine students’ L2 self-regulated speaking practice over a five-week pedagogical intervention of digital oral dialogue journaling (DODJ). Limitations of the study should be noted when interpreting the findings. First, the absence of a control group is noteworthy. Although there is evidence that learners improved their SRL speaking strategy use, we cannot definitively attribute this improvement solely to the DODJ intervention. Future research should investigate the effect of DODJ in comparison to a group of learners who do not experience DODJ. Second, the small sample size drawn from a Hong Kong secondary school might limit the generalizability of the results to wider populations. We encourage future studies to apply DODJ to educational contexts with larger and more demographically diverse student cohorts to further examine its effectiveness. Third, our intervention lasted five weeks, which might be considered too short to observe sustained changes in behavior. This limitation could be addressed by future research replicating the study with a longer duration of intervention, while adding a delayed post-intervention measure to investigate whether students’ changes in self-regulated learning remain over the long term. There is also a possibility that the first round of interviews might influence students’ learning behavior. The teacher being the researcher for conducting interviews might also potentially introduce bias to the results observed. We therefore encourage future replication studies to involve an external researcher for data collection to further cross-check the findings of our study. Finally, data collected in this study were from self-reports, the accuracy of which depend on participants’ honesty and memory recall. We therefore call for future research to use task-specific measures that record students’ strategic behavior on a more frequent basis (e.g., daily observation sheet) for triangulation to improve the validity and trustworthiness of the results. Despite these limitations, we believe this study offers important insights into the effectiveness of an innovative pedagogy for promoting self-regulated speaking, with useful and practical suggestions for implementation within and beyond the L2 classroom.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Sihan Zhou

Scott Aubrey

Notes

Author Biographies

Sihan Zhou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Faculty of Education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on students’ self-regulated L2 learning and English-medium instruction. Her work has most recently appeared in journals such as Language Teaching, System, Language Teaching Research, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, Applied Linguistics Review, ELT Journal, and RELC Journal.

Wing Suet Tso graduated from the Bachelor of Arts (English Studies) and Bachelor of Education (English Language Education) Double Degree Program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is now working as an English teacher at a local secondary school.

Scott Aubrey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Faculty of Education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His main research interests are learner engagement and task-based language teaching. He has published in journals such as Language Teaching Research, TESOL Quarterly, System, Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, ELT Journal, and RELC Journal.

Appendix 1. Instructions for Digital Oral Dialogue Journaling (DODJ)

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