<![CDATA[Although game-based media are frequently promoted to address the narrative writing challenges of junior high school EFL learners, their contribution to measurable writing achievement remains underexamined relative to conventional instruction. This study investigated whether students taught with Story Cubes achieved different narrative writing outcomes than those taught through conventional writing instruction, and explored students’ perceptions of using Story Cubes as writing prompts. A quasi-experimental design was employed, involving two eighth-grade classes at a public junior high school in Mojokerto. The participants comprised 31 students in the experimental group and 31 in the control group. Data were collected through pre- and post-test narrative writing tasks, an analytic writing rubric, and a Likert-scale questionnaire administered to the experimental group. The data were analyzed using the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test and the Mann-Whitney U Test. The findings showed that both groups improved significantly from pre-test to post-test, indicating that instruction in both conditions supported students’ writing development. However, the post-test comparison revealed no statistically significant difference between the experimental and control groups (p = .176), suggesting that Story Cubes did not yield superior writing achievement under the study's short-term instructional conditions. The findings indicate the need to examine Story Cubes within longer instructional sequences that include explicit genre instruction, feedback, and revision.]]>
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