The Effect of Teaching Short Stories through Awareness Raising on Reading Comprehension of Iranian EFL Learners

This study is an attempt to examine the effect of teaching short stories through awareness raising and investigate any probable correlation between teaching literary materials through awareness raising in Iranian EFL classes and rise in learners’ reading comprehension. To this end, an experimental study was done. Participants were Iranian EFL students were selected from Iran Language Institute of University Students. To homogenize the participants, The Oxford Quick Placement Test was administered and thirty of the learners who had lower intermediate English proficiency were selected as the research sample. Next, they were randomly divided into two groups, a control group (n=51) and an experimental one (n=51). The control group did not receive any special treatment for teaching the short stories and followed the traditional methods. Conversely, the experimental group was taught the same short stories in the same course of time using awareness raising activities, such as teaching the elements of short stories such as theme, symbol, characterization, point of view, and plot, providing a list of key words and specific words contextualized in some sample sentences, and raising the awareness of the learners about the short stories. The participants of the experimental groups were also provided with the biographical information on the author to raise the learners’ awareness of the context of the short story in question. The collected data were then analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS). An independent sample t-test was run. According to the obtained results, the experimental group demonstrates a better performance than the control group; however, the said outperformance is not significant.

کلیدواژه ها:

Awareness Raising ، EFL ، Literature ، Reading Comprehension