<![CDATA[As Indonesian as a Foreign Language expands globally, international learners face significant cognitive load and affective barriers when encountering unmediated target-language literature. This systematic literature review investigates the integration of Digital Humanities tools, cognitive scaffolding mechanics, teacher agency constraints, and data privacy frameworks across contemporary literature instruction. Guided by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses protocol, comprehensive searches were conducted across Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, and SINTA databases, followed by multi-stage screening against predefined eligibility criteria to identify 25 primary indexed studies published between 2021 and 2026 were qualitatively synthesized. Findings reveal that digital tool deployment is dominated by digitized text repositories (48%) and multimodal audio-visual media (34%), whereas interactive web-based simulations constitute only 18%. While digital storytelling mechanics such as visual culinary glossing, comparative folktale mapping, and branching choice simulations mitigate extraneous cognitive load and lower affective reading filters, the field suffers from a proficiency-blindness gap, with 72% of studies targeting unstratified general levels and only 4% addressing advanced learners. Furthermore, a concentration of early-stage development research (44%) and reliance on third-party commercial platforms exposes foreign learners to data telemetry risks while constraining instructor technical agency. To establish ethically sound pedagogy, institutions must transition toward open-source, client-side web architectures specifically client-side HyperText Markup Language and Vanilla JavaScript supported by teacher prompt engineering workflows to guarantee learner privacy and foster instructional autonomy.]]>
