A Study of the Effect of Using Narratives on Iranian EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension Ability

Moussa Ahmadian, Ashkan Pashangzadeh

Abstract


The importance of narratives as a significant type of literary texts and their presence in all aspects of society and social experiences of ours by and large is not hidden to anyone; the ever-presence of narratives in every age, every place and in every language is completely tangible. As such, the role and influence of narratives in language learning and in teaching an L2 have almost ever been a considerable debate among experts: psycholinguists, SLA researchers, and language educationalists. In this respect, the present study attempts to investigate the relationship between the use of narratives in EFL environments and its probable effects on EFL learners’ reading comprehension abilities compared to using non-narratives. To do so, 87 Persian native-speaking Arak university students majoring in English Translation were selected from among 98 ones and were put into three homogeneous intact groups: two experimental groups, namely, Narrative and Non-narrative groups (consisting of 28 and 35 participants, respectively) and one control group consisting of 24 participants. Three short narrative texts and three non-narrative ones with Flesch Reading Ease scores between 65 and 75 were selected from a large body of existing texts and were used as tasks of elicitation. The results of statistical comparisons between the performance of the groups indicated the over performance of the Narrative experimental group over the Non-narrative experimental group, and both experimental groups over the control group, thus showing the effects of using narratives on EFL learners’ reading comprehension ability. Possible reasons for this over-performance and implications of the findings for language teaching will be discussed.

 


Keywords


Narrative, Non-narrative, Reading comprehension, Second language acquisition, Language Teaching

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References


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DOI: https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.2n.3p.153

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