The use of stories as a pedagogical strategy to improve reading comprehension

Abstract

This study aimed to evaluate changes in the reading comprehension performance of EFL students following an instructional intervention based on local legends from Pujilí. The intervention incorporated A2-level reading activities adapted from Cambridge A2 Flyers-type tasks combining culturally contextualized narrative texts with skimming and scanning strategies within Communicative Language Teaching and Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT). A quantitative, one-group pretest–posttest pre-experimental design was employed with 22 fourth-semester students enrolled in the Pedagogy of National and Foreign Languages program at the Technical University of Cotopaxi, Pujilí Extension. Students worked with short narrative texts based on traditional legends from Pujilí, created by university students and faculty members and adapted to the A2 instructional level through pre-reading, while-reading, and post-reading activities. Reading-comprehension performance increased from a pretest mean of 5.62 to a posttest mean of 9.69. The paired-samples t test showed a statistically significant difference between the two measurement points, t(21) = 8.465, p < .001, and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test produced the same significant result, p < .001. The findings indicated substantial within-group improvement in reading-comprehension performance after the intervention. However, because the study used a one-group pre-experimental design, the results should not be interpreted as definitive evidence of causality.