The Effect of Retelling Technique on Reading Comprehension of Iranian High School Students

Transcription

1 International Journal of Basic Sciences & Applied Research. Vol., 3 (SP), 73-77, 2014 Available online at ISSN The Effect of Retelling Technique on Reading Comprehension of Iranian High School Students Maryam Rohani 1, Behrooz Ghoorchaei 2* ¹Department of English Language Teaching, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Golestan, Iran 2 Ph.D in TEFL, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran * Corresponding Author behroozghoorchaei@gmail.com Abstract Little research has been done on whether the retelling technique can enhance English comprehension among L2 readers. This study examined the impact of the retelling technique on English reading comprehension for 70 first grades of high school students from Iran. The study was conducted on intermediate female students. To achieve the purpose of the study, the researcher chose a sample of 85 subjects, which were reduced to 70homogenous students. Then, the subjects were randomly assigned to one experimental and one control groups. Subjects in these groups were given a pretest at the beginning of the semester. In the following sessions, the students in the experimental group were trained in using retelling strategy along with seven texts, while the students in the control group had conventional techniques with the same texts. The results of data which analyzed by using t- test indicated a significant difference between these two groups. The results showed that retelling significantly improved the participants text comprehension at the level of overall meaning. It also helped them to learn general concepts during reading and to draw connections between pieces of information introduced at different parts of the text. Keywords: Reading comprehension, Retelling, Reading strategy, Conventional teaching. Introduction Reading comprehension strategies for EFL learners should not only promote memorizing linguistic symbols, but also understanding ideas in the text (Lin, 2010).Pressley (2002) emphasized that reading education should focus on comprehension instruction: readers should be taught comprehension strategies. Reading comprehension is multifaceted and cannot be adequately measured by any single approach, process, or test (Paris & Stahl, 2005). In many EFL classrooms if teacher asks students to describe what they have read in many tell you, I don t remember, or I have no idea about that. These responses show that EFL learners cannot remember anything after they read a text. In some cases the reader can guess the meaning of unknown words in text but he or she can neither connect ideas in a passage nor has difficulty in connecting what is read to prior knowledge. To overcome this problem, a teacher should help students to increase their comprehension from text. One strategy that helps students to enhance their reading comprehension ability is retelling. Retelling is an active process which encourages children to reconstruct the text, and increase their understanding of setting and story structure (Gibson et al., 2003). It is recognized that there is an important relationship between retelling and reading comprehension (Koskinen et al., 1988)." Retelling is a system for evaluating the depth and breadth of student text understandings based on their attempts to retell or recall what they have read"(cohen et al., 2009). According to Morrow (1985, 1986, 1989), Pellegrini, and Galad (1982) retelling significantly improved kindergarten children s ability to recall more story elements, enhanced their sense of story structure, and increased the complexity of their oral language. In addition, retelling increased elementary school students comprehension of text-based propositions (Gambrell et al., 1991; Gambrell, et al., 1985). Lin (2010) showed that retelling is effective in improving Chinese readers ability to comprehend English text. It is clear that little research has been conducted on examining the effects of retelling as a strategy for improving reading comprehension. In addition, there have been no studies about the effect of retelling on reading comprehension of Iranian high school students. So the researcher s goal is to find out whether retelling plays a considerable role on reading comprehension of Iranian high school students who are in intermediate level.

2 Significance of the Study This study is significant in that it attempts to examine the effectiveness and efficiency of oral retelling on comprehension of Iranian high school students and compares it with traditional methods that are used in class. Teachers who use retellings for comprehension assessment find that they can monitor student progress effectively and thoroughly, and can do so in less time than traditional methods (Gambrel et al., 1985; Reutzel & Cooter, 2007). Unfortunately, many second or foreign language teachers assume the students have mastered reading skills previously. In fact, during the reading courses, the students are tested rather than be trained. Obviously, due to the overwhelming cognitive load of comprehending the text, most students are confronted a lot of difficulties in deciphering the sentences (De Quiros, 2008). Therefore, they should be trained those reading strategies that prepare them to overcome those short coming which may affect their performance during the comprehension process. Researches indicate that retelling increase both the quality and quantity of what is comprehended. This study implies that the teacher can use retelling as a way to build silent reading fluency and to measure comprehension. The general format of the retelling technique in this study is the reading to oral, in which students read a selection and retell it orally. Lin (2010) showed in his study that retelling technique in reading to written format enhanced Chinese learners reading comprehension. By using retelling technique in oral format the teacher can examine the students comprehension and pronunciation at the same time. Review of the Related Literature "Reading to improve pronunciation, practice grammatical forms, and study vocabulary do not constitute reading at all because reading involves comprehension" (Chastain, 1988). Reading comprehension is the process of making meaning from text. The goal, therefore, is to gain an overall understanding of what is described in the text rather than to obtain meaning from isolated words or sentences (Woolley, 2011). Reading strategies are tools that teachers use to help students learn to read and comprehend what they are reading. There are hundreds reading strategies available to help students with their comprehension at different levels and with different types of text (Prado & Plourde, 2005). One of these strategies is retelling. Retelling is one of the best and most efficient strategies for discovering whether a child understands what he or she has read (Gambrell et al., 1985; Reutzel & Cooter, 2007). Retelling provides insight into the students ability to recall details, make inferences, and recognize structural relationships strategies not assessed by formal measures, diagnostic batteries or informal reading inventories (Reutzel & Cooter, 2007). Gibson et al, (2003) mentioned that extended use of the technique of story retelling leads to large improvements in story comprehension, making inferences, and understanding of story structure. Retelling is a powerful classroom tool for building comprehension (Kissner, 2006). In story retelling, readers or listeners tell what they remember about the story orally or through dramatization, drawing, or writing (Morrow, 1989). Some researchers examined the effects of retelling technique on different aspects of language proficiency and found that there were significant differences in the effects of the retelling strategy on kindergarten and elementary school students (Morrow, 1985, 1986; Pellegrini & Galad, 1982). Gambrell et al.,(1989) compared the effects of a retelling strategy versus a questioning strategy as post reading activities. Result showed that the retelling strategy was more effective than questioning strategy for increasing reading comprehension based on a free-recall measure. Recently, a significant research was done by Lin (2010) to examine the impact of the retelling technique on English reading comprehension of Chinese students. The results showed that retelling significantly improved the participant s text comprehension at the level of overall meaning. Research Questions and Hypotheses The purpose of this study was to investigate the possible effect of retelling technique on reading comprehension of EFL learners during the term of instruction. So with attention the purpose of this study the following questions were probed: Q1). Does retelling technique significantly enhance the student s reading ability? Q2). Are there any significant differences between the results of the instruction based on retelling strategy and those which are conventional based? For the above research questions, the following null hypotheses are assumed: H1). Retelling technique has no significant effect on EFL learners reading comprehension. H2). There is no significant difference between the results of the instruction based on retelling, and those which are conventional based. Methodology Subjects: Participants were 70 female students aged 15 to 17, with Persian as their mother tongue, who were learning English as a foreign language at school. This study was done on students in first grade of high school in Gorgan, Iran. They had English one session in a week. Instruments English proficiency test: An Oxford proficiency test, administered as a standard criterion to 85 students at the beginning of the treatment. This test was included 60 multiple-choice items in four parts of cloze tests, grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. The time allotted was 30 minutes. The reliability of proficiency test was 0.74 which is higher than 0.7. According to the results of the

3 proficiency test the students whose marks were between 20 and 30 were selected as intermediate students and randomly divided to two groups; one control group and one experimental group. Reading comprehension pre- and post-tests: The second test for measuring the comprehension ability of the students before applying the treatment was an English reading comprehension pre-test designed and administered to control group and experimental group. This test consisted of four English passages with 20 multiple-choice items.the questions were taken from Gaj work books that were standard. The topics of the test related to the topics of the students' text book taught in the class. The texts included different topics such as the funny farmhand, a story about Newton, the school bus and high ways in the sky. All questions had exactly four answer choices. Participants were not asked open ended, matching, true/false, nor short answer questions and each question had one acceptable answer. The third one was post- test which was administered to all participants after the intervention program. The post-test was the same as pretest. Necessary time for each pre and post-test was 60 minutes for all groups. Procedure: In this study, 70 students from one high school participated. The students informed that they were helping in doing a research, but they were not informed about the goal and the subject of the research. The study was conducted in an English class, which met for two hours class meeting each week. Eight class meetings were used for the study. As primary step, a standard proficiency test was administered to 85 subjects who were in first grade of high school in Gorgan, Iran, and those who were at intermediate level were selected as homogeneous 70 female students took part in this study. These 70 students were randomly assigned to one control and one experimental group. Then, the students took a pretest before receiving any treatment in order to measure the comprehension ability of the students. The test had multiple choice formats and its topic relates to the topics of students' text book. Seven passages along with relevant questions were covered in this study, two texts for first step of the treatment that students were exposed to explicit instruction of the retelling technique at hand, and five texts for second phase of the treatment that the students were asked to have more practice of the technique. At the beginning of first session, the teacher explained the retelling technique in this study was the reading to oral, in which students read the text for 30 minutes then retold it orally with their own words. To became familiar with this technique the teacher read one text from students' text book, and asked the students to listen to the story retold orally by the teacher. At the end of explicit instruction phase, students acquired knowledge about this strategy but still had not applied it to longer reading passage. Now it was time for them to practice the retelling technique at hand by reading another text in their book. The teacher helped them with their difficulties, and they received corrective feedbacks on their retelling by the teacher. During the course of training, the participants in control group received non-retelling based instruction but were taught using traditional reading instruction, which teacher used grammar translation method. The participants of the control group were assigned to read the same passage as the participants in the experimental group. Totally, 7 passages with some multiple choice items were covered during 8 sessions. One week after the last treatment, the students were administered a post-test similar to the pre-test with the same difficulty level. Data Analysis: After data collection, Statistic Package for Social Science for Windows (SPSS) version 15.0 was used to compute the data collected from reading comprehension pre- and post-tests. I conducted the independent samples t-tests and paired t-tests to investigate whether there are differences between the experimental and control groups on reading comprehension tests and during- and after reading performance. The analysis focused on why the students who were trained with the retelling technique perceived retelling as a useful tool to improve their reading comprehension or why not. The qualitative analysis was used as supplementary data to help interpret the results of the statistical analysis. Results The following section discusses the results for each research question and tests the null hypotheses. Research Question One 1. Does retelling technique significantly enhance the students reading comprehension? This question was answered by comparing the results of reading comprehension pre- and post-tests from in the experimental group. In order to investigate the effect of treatment on experimental group a paired t-test is required. Table 1 presents mean scores (M) and standard deviations (SDs) for the experimental groups reading comprehension pre- and post-tests. The results of paired samples tests in Table 2 showed that there was a significant difference between the experimental group s pre- and post-tests (t = , df = 34, p =.000 < 0.05).So that, the participants who received retelling-based instruction significantly improved their reading comprehension. 35

4 As it is revealed, Sig. value in Table 2. Is Therefore, there is a difference between the mean scores of experimental reading comprehension pre-test and post-test, and the first null hypothesis is rejected in terms of Sig. value. Research Question Two Table 1. Paired Samples Statistics. Mean N Experimental-post Experimental-pre Are there any significant differences between the results of the instruction based on retelling strategy and those which are conventional based? This question was answered by comparing the results of reading comprehension pre- and post-tests from the experimental and control groups. Table 3 presents mean scores (M) and standard deviations (SDs) for the experimental and control groups reading comprehension pre- and post-tests. In the pre-test, the experimental group and the control group, respectively, answered 7.54% and 7.71% correctly. In the post-test, the experimental group and the control group, respectively, answered 17.23% and 11.23% correctly. Thus, the experimental group improved by 9.69%, from 7.54% in the pre-test to 17.23% in the post-test; in contrast, the control group improved by 3.34%, from 7.71%to 11.23%.Table 2. Indicated the mean scores of reading comprehension post-test after using retelling technique in experimental group and conventional technique in control group. The results further indicated that there was no significant difference between the experimental and control groups mean scores on the pre-test (t =-.395, df = 68, p =.694 > 0.05). The reading comprehension ability of the experimental group is similar to that of the control group before the retelling intervention started. However, there was a significant difference between the mean scores of the two groups on the post-test (t = , df = 68, p =.000 < 0.05). The experimental group achieved significantly higher scores than the control group in the post-test. This means that after the retelling intervention, the retelling instruction group outperformed the control group on the reading comprehension post-test. Because is less than 0.05, the difference between the mean scores of two groups is significant, so the second null hypothesis is rejected. Experimental-post & experimental-pre Table 2. Paired Samples Test. Paired Differences Mean Error Mean 95% Confidence Interval of the Difference t df Sig. (2- tailed) Lower Upper Test Table 3.The Independent Samples T-test for the Experimental and Control Groups. Experimental Control N=35 N=35 Mean Mean t p Pre-test Post-test Discussion and Conclusion The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of oral retelling on the reading comprehension of Iranian EFL learners. The present study used the retelling technique as a comprehension strategy to improve this process, and it also explored participants experience in using the retelling technique. Regarding the research questions, findings of the study demonstrated that the use of oral retelling has been effective in improving the students' reading comprehension ability. In this study, the experimental group achieved better results than control group in the following areas: the reading comprehension post-test, some reading

5 comprehension strategies approached in the during reading phase and some in the after reading phase The results of higher score of experimental group in the reading comprehension post-test provided compelling evidence that the retelling technique effectively increases participants comprehension ability. This study supported the studies which have shown that the ability to reconstruct and integrate meaning in student's own word is indeed an important component of L2 reading comprehension. It is also in agreement with Lin's study (2010) that examined the impact of the retelling technique on English reading comprehension for Chinese students. The results showed that retelling significantly improved the participants text comprehension. It also helped them to distinguish between ideas, and retain a sequence of events. The experimental participants could distinguish better than control participants between main and supporting ideas. They also performed better in drawing connections between pieces of information introduced at different parts of the text. This study was focused on the female students and on a specific text type. The researcher focused the effect of retelling technique on reading comprehension of female first grade high school students. On the basis of these limitations, some suggestions are provided for doing further research. In this study, the researcher focused on female students of high school. In order to enhance generalization, one may want to choose a more age and gender. The texts which used in this study were taken from students` text book. In other studies, the researchers may focus on the other text types. Also, the number of passages used here was low. There were only seven texts. To prevent other variables from interfering with the objectivity of the results, the period of practice and intervention lasted for eight weeks; so, the participants could not read more articles. In the current study only 70 students participated. Such small group may reduce the external validity of the study, so, other researches can work on a large population. Another limitation is the fact that this study only worked on reading comprehension area. Therefore, the extent to which the findings would generalize across other areas of reading (e.g., fluency) is unclear. References Chastain K, Developing Second Language Skills: Theory and Practice (3rd edition.), University of Virginia. Cohen Lynn, Krustedt Rosanne L & May Maria, Fluency, Text Structure, and Retelling: A Complex Relationship, Reading Horizons, 49( 2). De Quiros AC, Structured Story Reading and Retell Related to Listening Comprehension and Vocabulary Acquisition Among English Language Learners, Retrieved. Gambrell LB, Pfeiffer W & Wilson R, The Effects of Retelling upon Reading Comprehension and Recall of Text Information, Journal of Educational Research, 78: Gambrell LB, Koskinen P S & Kapinus B A, Retelling and the Reading Comprehension of Proficient and Less-proficient Readers, Journal of Educational Research, 84(6): Gambrell LB, Miller D, King S & Thompson J, Verbal Rehearsal and Reading Comprehension Performance, Paper Presented at the National Reading Conference, Austin, TX. Gibson A., Gold J & Sgouros C, The Power of Story Retelling, Retrieved. Kissner K, Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling: Skill for Better Reading, Writing, and Test Taking, University of Michigan. Koskinen PS, Gambrell L B, Kapinus B A. & Heathington B S,1988. Retelling: A Strategy for Enhancing Students Reading Comprehension and Prior Knowledge, The Reading Teacher, 41(9): Lin L F, The Impact of the Retelling Technique on Chinese Students' English Reading Comprehension, Asian EFL Journal Quarterly,12: Morrow L M, Retelling Stories: a Strategy for Improving Young Children s Comprehension, Concept of Story Structure, and Oral Language Complexity, The Elementary School Journal, 85: Morrow LM, Effects of Structural Guidance in Story Retelling on Children s Dictation of Original Stories, Journal of Reading Behavior,18: Morrow L M,1989. Using Story Retelling to Develop Comprehension, In K.D. Muth (Ed.), Children s Comprehension of Text: Research into Practice : 58,Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Paris S G & Stahl S A (Eds.), Children s Reading Comprehension and Assessment. Pellegrini AD & Galda L, The Effects of Thematic-Fantasy Play Training on the Development of Children s Story Comprehension, American Educational Research Journal, 19: Pressley M, Conclusion: Improving comprehension instruction: A path for the future, Reutzel DR & Cooter R B Jr, Strategies for Reading Assessment and Instruction: Helping Every Child Succeed (3rd ed.), Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc. Woolley G, Developing Reading Comprehension: Combining Visual and Verbal Cognitive Processes, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 33(2):