Abstract
The growing emphasis on culturally responsive and decolonizing approaches in higher education highlights the need for pedagogical methods that support deeper engagement with national literary heritage. Within this context, teaching the literary representation of Alash intellectuals poses both educational and methodological challenges, particularly when traditional lecture-based instruction results in low student engagement and surface-level historical understanding. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of storytelling and dramatization as integrated instructional methods for teaching Alash-related literary content at the university level. The research tasks included designing a structured pedagogical model, implementing it in a controlled classroom environment, and assessing its impact on students’ cognitive, emotional, and communicative outcomes. The study contributes to the field by offering a systematic instructional framework combining narrative and performative learning and by providing empirical evidence of its effectiveness. Results demonstrate that students exposed to storytelling and dramatization showed significantly higher comprehension, memory retention, participation, emotional engagement, and creative expression compared with those taught through traditional lecture methods. These findings confirm that narrative-based and performative approaches enhance learning effectiveness and support deeper historical and literary understanding in culturally specific university courses.