Abstract:
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of short stories on
improving students' reading comprehension. Based on a non-equivalent control
group pre- test post- test quasi- experimental design, the study was conducted on
100 grade 12 students in Tenta Woreda, at Adjibar Preparatory and Secondary
School. From the total of 360 grade 12 students enrolled in 2011/'12 academic
year, and assigned in 7 sections (A-G}, section A (n= 48) and section B (n=52)
were used as experimental and conirol.qroup respectively. The groups were intact
and the researcher was assigned to teach the two classes only. Due to this,
convenient sampling technique was used to select the study groups, and lottery
method was employed to determine the experimental and control group. The data
collection instruments used in this study were tests and questionnaire. To check
the two sections pre-intervention reading comprehension level, two equivalent pre
tests were administered, and to measure the two groups' post-intervention
reading comprehension improvement, two equivalent post-tests were given. The
questionnaire was used to measure the experimental students' appraisal rate
about the intervention program. "Foi'<daia=analuses, both quantitative and
qualitative approaches were used. Qualitative analysis was used for the data
collected from the basic characteristics of the target population and quantitative
approach was employed for the data collected through the tests and
questionnaire. The tests scores were computed using independent and paired
samples t test, and the data from the questionnaire were computed using one
sample t test. For these analyses SPSS version 15 soft-ware program was used.
The two pre-tests result from independent sample t test revealed uniformity
between the two groups with a little-variation_ a fact that is often expected in
any group of learners. The findings from ·the post-tests asserted that the EG
showed significant reading comprehension improvement over that of the CG in
which significant pre-to-post reading achievement test scores improvement was
not seen. The result from the one sample t test data analysis showed that the
program was acceptable and effective. The findings of this study, in general,
imply that integrating short stories in EFL class is effective to promote students'
reading comprehension. To this send, it is important to remind that sound and
appropriate recommendations were given to EFL teachers to incorporate literary
texts in- the language teaching program, -to -material writers to give consideration
for the inclusion of'efficieni and sufficient literaru texts into English text books,
and to those who are interested to conduct further study in the area.
