The Comparative Effects of Using Electronic Short Story Books and Tradi-tional Printed Texts on EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension

Subject Areas : All areas of language and translation

Abdollah Baradaran ¹ , Sepeedeh Hanifehzadeh ²

1 - Islamic Azad University, Central Tehran Branch
2 - Islamic Azad University, Central Tehran Branch

Received: 2011-02-05 Accepted : 2012-01-11 Published : 2013-08-01

Keywords: reading comprehension, electronic books, Multimedia, Short Stories,

Abstract :

The purpose of this study was to investigate the comparative effect of using electronic short story books and traditional printed texts on EFL learners’ reading comprehension. For that purpose, ninety female learners ranging in age between fifteen and thirty five sat for the language proficiency test (PET, 2009) as the test of homogeneity and consequently sixty students were selected based on their obtained scores in the test and were randomly assigned into two groups to receive two kinds of instructional procedures including electronic and traditional short story readings. One group was required to read four electronic short story books and the other group read the same short stories in the printed version. For the purpose of the study, the researchers used twenty four open-ended comprehension questions which were answered by the students in the two groups in order to measure their reading comprehension of all four short story books. After that, a two-tailed test of significance (t-test) was run between the obtained means of the two groups on the open-ended comprehension questions to determine whether there is any significant difference between the performances of the two groups. The result revealed that there was a significant difference between the two groups with the electronic group outperforming the non-electronic one.