Creating digital stories refers to the practice of combining narrative with digital content, including images, sound, animation and video, to create a short movie. Although studies on digital storytelling abound in the literature, few focus on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students' story development process or explore the skills they employ to complete their multimodal stories. Moreover, the understanding of the extent to which learners engage in composing multimodal stories remains limited. Hence, the current study bridged the research gaps by (1) exploring the cognitive and metacognitive skills EFL leaners develop when composing digital stories, and (2) examining if the utilization of these skills changes with respect to levels of engagement. Eighty-eight learners participated in a multimodal project in which they generated linguistic, audio and animated contents for their digital stories. Instruments included three scales on cognitive skills, metacognitive skills, and engagement and students' reflections. The results revealed that learners frequently employed cognitive skills (e.g., analyzing, generating) and metacognitive skills (e.g., planning, monitoring) when composing multimodal texts and gathering digital elements for their stories. Moreover, highly engaged learners employed more cognitive and metacognitive skills than less engaged students at a significant level. Hence, it is concluded that digital storytelling can help EFL learners develop skills that facilitate multiliteracies practices.