Alsamadani, A. (2017).

The effect of talking story books on Saudi young EFL learners’ reading
comprehension. English Language Teaching, 10(5), 204-213.

Summary
The research study investigated the effects of talking story books on Saudi young EFL learners’
reading comprehension skills. Samples in this study were Saudi young EFL learners randomly
selected and divided into two groups that consisted of an experimental group with 40 students and a
control group with 39 students. Students of both groups took a pre- test on reading comprehension
at the mid of the 2016 school year. The researcher used the talking story books as the intervention
when teaching the experimental group for four weeks whereas the students in the control group
were taught without using talking story books. After four weeks of instruction, both groups
completed the same reading comprehension test again as the post-test. The study revealed that
students who attended reading classes using talking story books outperformed their control group
counterparts in many reading-based skills. This is indicative of the positive effects of talking story
books on EFL young learners reading comprehension skills.

Review
In my personal education experiences, I hadn’t been taught by using story books before. All my
teachers just kept teaching the texts by text books, so the aforementioned study makes me think that
to teach students by using story books in the future. In my undergraduate program, I got some
opportunities to teach elementary school students with Chinese story books. During the time, I
observed that most of students enjoyed the stories and they were willing to share their feelings to
other students and teachers. In my internship, I also found out that some students liked to read
storybooks or novels during their break time and some would even read those story books in class.
As a result, they loved reading more story books. Therefore, I do agree using story books to teach
EFL learners in Taiwan. Since the four texts that had been used in this research study seemed useful
for my students in the future; I can adjust them based on my teaching method and strategies.
Take the current English language teaching reality in Taiwan for instance, besides required
reading articles given by school, English teachers seldom have time to give extra reading activities
such as talking story books for their students. They have to stay on the schedule of syllabus that are
designed and given by the MOE to help students to meet the requirements such as exams. It’s a
future problem for me to take into consideration from now on.
Moreover, there are some parts I learned from the research design such as the experiment period
as it just took four weeks to complete. Although the author used the pre-test and post-test to
measure the improvement and some positive effects had been found from the experimental group, I
believe the time variable is still too short to find out more differences between the experimental and
the control groups. One of reasons is that reading comprehension is a long process for pupils to
build up; the longer period of time might help me discover more significant differences.
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