Improving Junior High School Students’ Reading Literacy through Comic-Based Dialogue

Abstract

This Despite the growing use of digital comics in English language learning, limited research has examined the effectiveness of researcher-developed dialogue-based digital comics for improving reading literacy among junior high school students in under-resourced schools with limited internet access. Therefore, this study investigated the effectiveness of dialogue-based digital comics in enhancing students’ reading literacy in a remote educational setting. The study employed a quantitative pre-experimental approach using a one-group pretest-posttest design. Fifteen eighth-grade students from a public junior high school in South Konawe Regency, Indonesia, participated in the study. Reading literacy data were collected through a 15-item multiple-choice test administered before and after six instructional sessions using dialogue-based digital comics. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, the Shapiro-Wilk normality test, and a paired-samples t-test. The findings revealed that the mean score increased from 52.33 in the pretest to 65.33 in the posttest, with an average gain score of 13.00 points. The paired-samples t-test indicated a statistically significant improvement in students’ reading literacy (p = 0.005). These findings demonstrate that dialogue-based digital comics effectively support reading literacy development by providing contextualized visual and textual learning experiences and offer a practical instructional alternative for English language teaching in schools with limited technological resources.