Improving EFL Students’ Reading Comprehension Skill through Short Stories

Abstract

This descriptive analytical research, which adopted a mixed-method approach (qualitative and quantitative), was conducted to investigate teaching EFL students’ reading comprehension skill through short stories. The problems that most learners face in reading comprehension in terms of ambiguous words cause them not to understand the text, and the way a text is selected has an influence on the learners’ ability to achieve a better reading skill.  The purpose of the study is to investigate the use of short stories of EFL students of English department at Soran University, to find out how the use of short stories improves EFL students’ reading comprehension skill. The importance of the study can be beneficial to Kurdish EFL University students, instructors, Kurdish EFL lecturers and syllabus designers.

The researcher has used three research questions with two mixed tools for data collection: one is a qualitative tool (Teacher interview) and quantitative tool; the sample of the study was selected from Soran University, Faculty of Arts, English department. The researcher has used (19) questionnaire items with students and interview questions with university instructors as two research tools by using SPSS to analyze data. The findings of the study resulted that short stories were worthy to improve students’ reading comprehensions and teaching short stories is an active and practical way.