THE EFFECT OF DIGITAL STORIES ON READING COMPREHENSION: AN INTERNET-BASED INSTRUCTION FOR IRANIAN EFL YOUNG LEARNERS

The purpose of this study was to measure up the impact of digital stories on reading comprehension among Iranian young learners through an internet-based instruction. The design of the study was based on experimental method through pre and post test procedure. Thus, 90 students ranging from 11 to 16 years old were selected to take a placement test based on their English course book “Family and Friends 3”and the young learners whose scores were one standard deviation above and one standard deviation below the mean were chosen. Finally 60 subjects (18 boys and 42 girl, mean age = 12.7 years) were randomly divided in to three groups, two experimental and one control group. They took a pre-test of reading comprehension based on 10 digital stories based on three different groups’ instructions: 1) Internet-based with pre and post reading tasks, 2) Paper-based with the same pre and post reading tasks,3) Conventional instruction group without any pre or post reading tasks. For the first group, 10 digital stories available at the site WWW.learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org were worked on in 10 sections, together with pre-reading and post-reading tasks. For the two other instructions the hard copy of the same 10 digital stories were used. Finally, an immediate post-test was conducted to measure the effect of instructions on reading comprehension immediately after the final section. Immediate post-test measured the learners’ reading comprehension in the short-term recall. After two weeks, a delayed post-test was administered to assess the retention of the learners. Based on the results there was significant difference between the means of the three groups. Findings showed that the internet-based instruction of digital stories had the most effect on young EFL learners’ reading comprehension. Moreover, it was found out that using pre and post work activities can also help to improve learners’ reading comprehension.