Reading Comprehension Effective Factors: Translated Persian Folk Tales and English Short Stories Garden Path

A plethora of studies have been done on the factors affecting the learners’ reading comprehension ability and the effect of literature and short stories on this skill; however, almost no research has been conducted on the influence of translated Persian folk tales on EFL learners' reading comprehension. This study investigated the effect of reading both short stories and translated Persian folk tales on Iranian EFL learners’ reading comprehension, taking the learners' cultural background into consideration. To this end, 36 intermediate proficiency level participants from a pool of 60 EFL learners were divided into three groups; each took a reading comprehension test. To identify the effect of the two kinds of instruction, the first group was asked to read five English short stories and the second one was required to read five translated Persian folk tales while the third group received no treatment acting as the control group. In a two week interval, all three groups were given another reading comprehension test. The results of two one-way ANOVAs indicated that the effect of short stories was significant and the group who read short stories performed much better than the other two groups regarding the learners’ scores on the post-test. Although cultural background and Persian folk tales seemed to enhance reading comprehension, there was no significant difference between this group and control group. The findings of the present study showed that short stories could be useful resources to be implemented in reading classes to help the learners’ reading skill improvement

کلیدواژه ها:

English short story ، Persian folk tale ، Reading comprehension ، Iranian EFL learners