Effects of Task-based Short Stories Instruction on Iranian Upper-Intermediate EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of usingshort stories on EFL learners’ reading comprehension. The questions thisstudy tried to answer were whether there was a significant differencebetween the short story and general texts reading comprehensionperformance in Iranian intermediate EFL learners and also whetherstudents reading comprehension changed according to teaching the shortstories to intermediate EFL learners. To answer the questions, 60intermediate institute learners participated in the experiment of the study.They were randomly selected from among a population of upperintermediate learners via their performance on OPT. They were thendivided into two groups of 30 and were randomly assigned to anexperimental (short story) and a control group (general texts). A pretest ofEnglish reading comprehension was administered to both groups, then they were taught reading comprehension for 10 sessions but with differentmethodologies. A posttest of reading comprehension was thenadministered to both groups. The data of the study were analyzed usingthe independent samples t test and One-way ANCOVA. The resultsindicated that Iranian EFL learners in the experimental group receivedhigher reading comprehension scores after being treated with short story.

Keywords:

Reading comprehension , Short story , Task , General text