Abstract
Higher education places a high priority on helping prospective philologist-teachers develop their professional speech culture, but there is currently little data on scalable, low-cost approaches. This study investigated whether short podcast-style digital-storytelling assignments were associated with improvements across four dimensions of prospective philology teachers’ professional speech culture. Parallel intact sections were used in a quantitative, quasi-experimental pretest–posttest design. The control group tackled the same subjects through traditional exercises, while the DS group finished podcast tasks with a concentrated feedback-revision cycle. Two trained raters who were blind to group used a four-criterion analytical rubric to evaluate performance on the baseline and post-test. Additionally, students completed a 12-item self-report questionnaire aligned with the same four components at both time points. Analysis of covariance using the corresponding pre-test scores as covariates showed higher adjusted post-test scores for the experimental group across all four components. The largest effects were observed for Professional Style (partial ?² = .20) and Structure (partial ?² = .18), followed by Audience Focus (partial ?² = .08) and Diction (partial ?² = .07). The findings suggest that a lightweight DS workflow may support meaningful improvements in professional speech culture within a single course cycle. Received: 13 March 2026 / Accepted: 25 June 2026 / Published: July 2026